Grub Manual

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Oct 20 02:51:47 UTC 2007


David Boles wrote:
> 
> Hmm...  The drive letters will change when you add or remove drives. But
> most people that add and remove drives have some idea of what it is that
> they are doing. And they don't do it as often as they put on or remove
> their shoes.
> 
> I have *never* done this, physically add/remove drives thing, in an
> installed Linux myself but I would be willing to bet that Linux, any
> brand, would get confused too.

With the old ide /dev/hdx notation, drives stayed where you put them 
according to the controller and cable or jumper position.  That is, the 
primary drive on the first controller is hda, the slave on the second 
controler is hdd whether or not there is anything added or removed in 
between.  With scsi it is dynamic, with /dev/sd? devices added in the 
order they are detected so if you add/remove early in the controller or 
drive select chain everything else moves.

> That is what the $PATH, in Linux or Windows, is for I think.  ;-)

No, you always mount the filesystems under the same names in  Linux, but 
that moves the problem to the grub configuration and /etc/fstab where 
you tell it what partitions to mount.  Auto-detected labels on 
filesystems that support them are supposed to solve this problem, but a 
default install puts the same labels on every installation so as soon as 
you try to move and re-use some drives the problem is even worse.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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