Problems installing with multiple drives

Emmett Culley emmett at webengineer.com
Sun Sep 5 00:13:19 UTC 2010


I have an Asus MB in a system with five SATA drives and an SATA DVD burner.  Each time I attempted to install Fedora 13 it would fail to reboot after the installation.  I finally noticed that upon reboot the drive names (e.g. /dev/sda) would change.  I'd configure sda and sdb to create md0 (/boot) and md1 (Physical volume), but upon restart sda would be named /dev/sde and all other drives would be named sdf, sdg, sdh and sdi.

No matter how many time I attempted to install, the drive device names would always be different upon first reboot.   Sometimes during installation anaconda would show me /dev/sda through /dev/sde during drive configuration, yet it would still reboot with /dev/sde through /dev/sdi.  Other time anaconda showed me /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdi, /dev/sdj and /dev/sdk.

I was finally able to get a "good" installation by only selecting the two drives with md0, md1 and swap space within the storage select dialog.  The system rebooted and is operational, I suppose because the only partitions used were either identified by UUDI or mapper (LVM partitions), because the two drives show up as devices /dev/sdf and /dev/sdg, yet they started out as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb during installation.

I had a somewhat similar issue with Fedora 12 in that it would never automatically recognize the md2 and md3 that were defined for the next two drives in the system.  I was required to running partprobe on each drive (/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd) then mdadm to assemble the raid pairs.

I cannot see how this can be a hardware issue, but it is the only system I've installed with more that two drives.

I suppose I should put in a bug report, and I will, but I'd like to know if I am the only on experiencing this issue.

Emmett


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