Topic: SME 6 not recognizing hard drive

[hillke]

I have used e-smith servers for quite a while.  I have a fairly standard configuration.  I install a small hard drive on IDE0,0 and a cdrom drive on IDE0,1.  I install e-smith and then remove the cdrom drive from IDE0,1.  I then attach additional hard drives to IDE0,1 IDE1,0 and IDE1,1.  Thus I should now have /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, and dev/hdd.  I then make changes to fstab to mount these hard drives in the appropriate places (usually in the ibays directory) and I have a huge file server.

On a recent new installation I can no longer use /dev/hdb.  I have tested every hard drive on every other device point and all the drives work fine and all the device points work fine except for /dev/hdb.  Out of curiousity, I reinstalled e-smith on a hard drive on IDE0,0 with the cdrom drive on IDE1,0 and quite to my surprise I lost use of /dev/hdc but regained /dev/hdb.

So, it appears that e-smith is some how grabbing the /dev/hd{b|c|d} device depending on where the cdrom drive was connected during the installation.  

I've modified lilo.conf where /dev/hd{b|c|d} were hard coded, I've removed an erroneous symbolic link of /dev/cdrom to /dev/hd{b|c|d} (see bug report forum).  I can not get my e-smith box to use the device where the cdrom drive was connected with the OS was installed.

I use e-smith boxes as drop in files servers were needed and I usually populate them with 3 additional 100GB hard drives.  This problem is causing me to lose 100GB of storage space in my new esmith boxes.

Any thoughts?

[MSmith]

My first attempt there would be to update the board's BIOS and have a hard look at how it handles its IDE controllers.

[hillke]

When I use a DOS boot CD or a KNOPPIX cd, I can see all the hard drives just fine.  I can mount every hard drive just fine.  

When e-smith boots, it sees lists each of the hard drives in the boot messages.  After the OS is up and running whatever location where the cd-rom drive was located during the installation, that drive device will not respond to the drive.  For example if the cd-rom was on IDE0,1 during the e-smith installation then /dev/hdb will not be usable if I swap the cd-rom with a hard drive.  If the cd-rom was on IDE1,0 then /dev/hdc will not be useable.  

This seems quite odd.