[CentOS] add on sata card relabeling drives, installation

[Craig White]

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