[CentOS] Re: Installation problem, possibly RAID

Sun Sep 11 18:06:51 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 12:17, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 11:41 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > I thought you could specify root=LABEL=xxx in the grub kernel line.  I
> > usually avoid labels when making custom changes because the stock
> > labels aren't unique and the system cannot deal with duplicates
> > if you ever move a disk to a different machine but it should work
> > if you just shift them around in the same box.
> 
> Yes and no.
> 
> Yes, it's more capable than NTLDR on a legacy PC BIOS/DOS disk label.
> 
> But no, it doesn't solve the BIOS disk order to Linux device name
> mapping issue.  You _still_ have to tell GRUB how to map BIOS fixed
> disks (80h, 81h, 82h, etc..., what GRUB calls hd0, hd1, hd2, etc...) to
> Linux devices (hda, hde, sda, etc...).

He's talking about finding the root partition here.  At that
point you have the kernel and initrd loaded and no longer
need bios.  Assume you have /boot on a partition that
bios understands and want to be able to arbitrarily move
the drive that holds the / partition around.  Won't
labels, LVM identifiers and even md devices be found
and assembled correctly from anywhere at this stage?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com