CentOS - Sep 2011 - add on sata card relabeling drives, installation

Hi all.

I have a new server and am playing with the installation. (centos 6). My 
onboard sata card has 6 drives attached to it,
yet the server has 8 bays. I bought a sata controller card (adaptec) and 
added it to the mix, adding two more drives.

Everything works and all is accessible, but there is one annoying issue.

When installing with anaconda, the 2 drives located on the add-on sata 
card are being listed as sda and sdb instead of going
to the back of the line.

I would rather my a and b drives be the 0 and 1 sata ports of the 
onboard controller, but it seems the add-on is taking priority.

My only thought is to install without the 2 drives connected and then 
add them afterwords.
But again, that makes no sense to have to do it that way.

Is this just normal for the add on sata cards?
If I add the drives to the system after I install it all, will linux 
barf on it and change the drive letters?

I do not want my raid 1 mirror OS to be on sdc, sdd, and sde....it just 
looks weird.


thanks

On Sep 28, 2011, at 4:47 PM, Bob Hoffman wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I have a new server and am playing with the installation. (centos 6). My 
> onboard sata card has 6 drives attached to it,
> yet the server has 8 bays. I bought a sata controller card (adaptec) and 
> added it to the mix, adding two more drives.
> 
> Everything works and all is accessible, but there is one annoying issue.
> 
> When installing with anaconda, the 2 drives located on the add-on sata 
> card are being listed as sda and sdb instead of going
> to the back of the line.
> 
> I would rather my a and b drives be the 0 and 1 sata ports of the 
> onboard controller, but it seems the add-on is taking priority.
> 
> My only thought is to install without the 2 drives connected and then 
> add them afterwords.
> But again, that makes no sense to have to do it that way.
> 
> Is this just normal for the add on sata cards?
> If I add the drives to the system after I install it all, will linux 
> barf on it and change the drive letters?
> 
> I do not want my raid 1 mirror OS to be on sdc, sdd, and sde....it just 
> looks weird.
----
get over it - it really doesn't matter and you seemingly want to do
cartwheels & headstands to fight the system.

It may actually be as simple as re-ordering the drives in BIOS but only you can
get into that.

If you install with the extra drives removed, you probably will have a difficult
time booting once you put them back in (probably will have to 'grub-install
/dev/sda' and edit /boot/grub/grub.conf to change the drive discovery).

If you install with the extra drives inserted and then remove them later, you
may also run into the same issues with booting.

You really should see if you can fix the drive ordering within BIOS itself.

If not, you should probably just live your mirrors on drives other than /dev/sda
& /dev/sdb

Craig

From: Bob Hoffman <bob at bobhoffman.com>
> When installing with anaconda, the 2 drives located on the add-on sata 
> card are being listed as sda and sdb instead of going
> to the back of the line.
Check in the bios if it proposes a ctrl detection order.

JD

On Wednesday, September 28, 2011 07:47:15 PM Bob Hoffman
wrote:
> I do not want my raid 1 mirror OS to be on sdc, sdd, and sde....it just 
> looks weird.
It's related to PCI enumeration order, and may not be changeable.  You could
try the add-on card in another slot.

However, if you think that's weird, I want you to note the portion of the
output of mount below, and note the drive device my /boot is on (and yes, that
is actually the real booting drive):

[root at www ~]# mount|grep boot
/dev/sdag1 on /boot type ext4 (rw)
[root at www ~]# cat /etc/issue
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.1 (Santiago)
Kernel \r on an \m

[root at www ~]#