Topic: 2 disks named hde? <long post>

[Dan Smith]

Hello all -

    As will be very evident, I'm a newbie at this linux/e-smith stuff, and I need some help.  I have a running e-smith server (5.6) with 2 hard drives:

  - 2 Gig Quantum Fireball connected to the motherboard IDE controller
  - 120 Gig Maxtor connected to Silicon Image ATA133 PCI board

When I first tried the install, only the 120G drive was connected to the PCI board.  Install seemed to go fine, but I couldn't boot the server - it printed "L" (I guess this was LILO failing on boot), and then hung.  After looking around on this forum and others, the solution seemed to be a complicated one involving editing the lilo.conf file, booting from a floppy, etc, to get it to see the PCI controller and drive on bootup.  Since I figured it was a drive/controller mapping issue, it seemed less complicated as a newbie to just put in the 2Gig drive, install to that, and let that be the boot drive.  Everything worked fine, and the server now successfully "sees" both drives:

[root@media1 root]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hde: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 238216 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1   *         1       203    102280+  83  Linux
/dev/hde2           204       723    262080   82  Linux swap
/dev/hde3           724    238216 119696472   83  Linux

Disk /dev/hda: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1        51    102784+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            52       181    262080   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3           182      1023   1697472   83  Linux

So here's the strange part.  Somehow, I have /dev/hda3 mounted as /dev/hde3, or something like that:

[root@media1 root]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde3             1.6G  472M  1.0G  31% /
/dev/hde1              97M  8.6M   83M  10% /boot
none                   30M     0   30M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hde3             112G  446M  106G   1% /test

As you can see, I mounted /dev/hde3 as a test (to /test), and it picked the correct 120G drive to mount.  Can anyone explain this?  I think it has something to do with the fact that I originally installed on the large disk, but couldn't boot to it, so I installed on the small disk, but the server images/partitions are still on the large disk.

Basically, I'm just looking to have hda be hda and hde be hde.  Being new to this, I'm not looking for too much confusion right now.  Can someone explain the best way to straighten this out.  If you need more info to answer the question, please let me know, and I'll post what I can ...

[Steve Brock]

Can you 'cat /etc/fstab' and 'cat /etc/modules.conf' and post the outputs here? thanks!

[Dan Smith]

Steve -  Thanks for the response  Here are the files:

[root@media1 root]# cat /etc/fstab
#------------------------------------------------------------
# BE CAREFUL WHEN MODIFYING THIS FILE! It is updated automatically
# by the SME server software. A few entries are updated during
# the template processing of the file and white space is removed,
# but otherwise changes to the file are preserved.
# For more information, see http://www.e-smith.org/custom/ and
# the template fragments in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/modules.conf/.
#
# copyright (C) 2002 Mitel Networks Corporation
#------------------------------------------------------------
LABEL=/1                /                       ext3    usrquota,grpquota        
1 1
LABEL=/boot1            /boot                   ext3    defaults        1
2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner    0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/hda2               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

[root@media1 root]# cat /etc/modules.conf
#------------------------------------------------------------
# BE CAREFUL WHEN MODIFYING THIS FILE! It is updated automatically
# by the SME server software. Various aliases are added and/or
# deleted by the template processing of the file and white space
# is removed, but otherwise changes to the file are preserved.
# For more information, see http://www.e-smith.org/custom/ and
# the template fragments in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/modules.conf/.
#
# copyright (C) 2002 Mitel Networks Corporation
#------------------------------------------------------------
path=/lib/modules/$(/bin/uname -r)-e-smith
path=/lib/modules/$(/bin/uname -r)
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
pre-install ide-scsi     modprobe ide-cd
alias char-major-43 hisax
alias net-pf-4 off
alias net-pf-10 off
alias net-pf-15 ipsec
alias net-pf-47 ip_gre
alias net-pf-50 ipsec
alias ppp ppp_generic
alias char-major-108 ppp
alias /dev/ppp ppp
alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async
alias tty-ldisc-14 ppp_synctty
alias ppp-compress-18 ppp_mppe
alias ppp-compress-21 bsd_comp
alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate
alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate
alias tap0 off
alias tap1 off
alias tap2 off
alias tap3 off
alias tap4 off
alias tap5 off
alias tap6 off
alias tap7 off
alias tap8 off
alias tap9 off
alias tap10 off
alias tap11 off
alias tap12 off
alias tap13 off
alias tap14 off
alias tap15 off
alias eth0 tulip
alias eth1 tulip

[Jim Little]

Well I have a theory as to what's happening.  You still have your partitions on the 120G drive from your original install and after the initial boot when the server remounts /root it is mounting those partitions instead (of /dev/hda).  They do have the right labels.  Don't know why that would happen though.  If you haven't copied over any data to the big drive yet try wiping the partition table, creating one big linux partition on it and reformat it. Then reboot and mount /dev/hde1 on /test.  In my experience e-smith is very picky about hardrive layouts.  You will likely need to disconect the drive and remove the extra /etc/fstab entry (assuming you add one later to make the drive mount on boot) each time you do an upgrade.

Any other theories?

Jim

[Steve Brock]

Jim, you're probably right.   silly labels.

Dan, try changing that line in fstab:
LABEL=/1 / ext3 usrquota,grpquota 1 1

to this:

/dev/hda3 / ext3 usrquota,grpquota1 1

and reboot. not a permanent fix, but it would tell you if its picking the label off the wrong drive.