On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 13:34, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 13:06 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > 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?
>
> If the disk order does not change in the BIOS, yes.
> But if the disk order changes in the BIOS, no.
> That's typically the problem.
>
> In reality, it's _also_ a problem for NT-based Windows too.
> Many people have only used DOS-based (9x/Me) Windows which can use BIOS
> Disk Services (aka "Using Compatibility Mode").
Why should the kernel/initrd-loaded stage care anything
at all about bios when finding the root partition?
/boot has to be found by bios, of course, but I'm
pretty sure I've put / partitions on drives with
no bios access at all that nothing knows about until
the kernel is loaded and probes for them.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com