sata and changing devices

[Gerry Reno]

Gerry Reno wrote:
> Just following up on this theme with respect to GRUB.  When Anaconda 
> installed GRUB it put entries into /boot/grub/device.map.  But in 
> grub> when I do a 'find /boot/grub/stage1' the list of devices 
> containing the boot files is altogether different from what is in 
> device.map.  So my question is this:  On systems with SATA, is 
> device.map no longer used?  Since it seems under GRUB that the devices 
> where GRUB finds the boot files keep changing between boots is 
> device.map even usable?
>
>
Also, with respect to modifying our low-level device management/backup 
tools to support SATA.  This is turning out to be somewhat more 
difficult than just using hdparm.  We rely on the output of mdadm, the 
lvm display commands, /etc/fstab and others to build a picture of the 
current state.  The problem is that with SATA none of these tools is 
producing an output that maps the devices to a particular known location 
where you could find a particular piece of hardware.  Prior to SATA for 
the most part people were using PATA devices and hda was always a 
specific piece of hardware.  But the tool output now is still using this 
type of device identification (sda) which in the future is actually 
meaningless and therefore is quite useless for building a picture of the 
current state that could be used later to recover the state in the event 
of some disaster.  I am looking for some suggestions as to how to 
generate a backup state picture for physical SATA devices that 
encompasses mbr, partition tables, raid configuraton, lvm configuration, 
and filesystem mounting using mdadm, {pv|lv|vg}display, {f|sf}disk or 
parted.  This was all very straightforward with PATA devices but is 
anything but with these SATA devices.

Regards,
Gerry