IDE drive detection under libata

Charles Curley charlescurley at charlescurley.com
Tue May 22 23:17:46 UTC 2007


I have a problem with the new IDE drivers under libata. I maintain
the Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO, available at the Linux
Documentation Project, or at
http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO.html.

The HOWTO includes several scripts which one runs at backup
time. These collect metadata (partition information, e.g.) and create
a series of one can use for bare metal recovery. The user should be
able to boot any recent Linux (probably a live CD), e.g. finnix, and
run the scripts to get a minimal running system, ready for further
data recovery.

I can run my backup scripts on F7T4 and they see the IDE drives as
SCSI drives. So all the restoration scripts refer to /dev/sd*. Not all
recovery distributions of Linux (e.g. finnix) have the IDE drives show
up as SCSI drives (/dev/sd*). So they will want to point to IDE drives
as /dev/hd*.

Some questions:

* At backup time, is there any way to detect whether a drive that
  appears as /dev/sdX is an IDE drive?

* At backup time, is there any way to find out which /dev/hdX drive it
  would be so I can mung the restoration scripts approriately.

* I found several comments on this list and elsewhere that indicate
  that /dev/hda will map to /dev/sda. Is this always true?

Thank you

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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