XEtedBear
March 14th, 2011, 09:29 PM
I'm trying to solve a boot issue on my system. After reading a lot of forum threads - especially about rebuilding Grub - I am totally confused by drive device names. Could I get some clarification please?
For example, the Grub rebuild guide tells me that my first drive is 'sda' - but what does 'first' mean? Who is doing the counting?
On my hardware I have 2 IDE channels. Is the 'first' drive that which is connectd to the Primary channel?
But wait, in my BIOS I can set the hard disk order (this is NOT the boot priority), so now for example I can set the disk on my secondary IDE channel as disk number 1. Is this now the first disk? Or is disk 0 the first disk?
It get even more confusing: If I use the command 'ls' when in the Command line option of the Grub menu, or use Gparted, my disks have names like HD0 and HD1 or HDA and HDC - what happened to HDB? But elsewhere the disks have names like SDA and SDB - how do these map to the HDxy names?
But we're not finished yet: about partitions: the Grub guidance tells me that the first partition on my disk will be hda1, the second will be hda2 - but are these the primary, extended or logical partitions? How do I do the counting? On one of my disks (I can't tell if it's the first or the second - even ignoring where the origin for counting is, zero or one) there are unallocated spaces between my partitions (according to Gparted). Are these spaces to be included in the partition count?
When it comes to fstab, I don't know if I should be setting my root disk as hda1 or hdc1 or sda3 or sdc5. There is insufficiently complete and unambiguous guidance. For somebody who is not fluent in Geek it is an unecessary source of stress in trying to make a Linux system work.
For example, the Grub rebuild guide tells me that my first drive is 'sda' - but what does 'first' mean? Who is doing the counting?
On my hardware I have 2 IDE channels. Is the 'first' drive that which is connectd to the Primary channel?
But wait, in my BIOS I can set the hard disk order (this is NOT the boot priority), so now for example I can set the disk on my secondary IDE channel as disk number 1. Is this now the first disk? Or is disk 0 the first disk?
It get even more confusing: If I use the command 'ls' when in the Command line option of the Grub menu, or use Gparted, my disks have names like HD0 and HD1 or HDA and HDC - what happened to HDB? But elsewhere the disks have names like SDA and SDB - how do these map to the HDxy names?
But we're not finished yet: about partitions: the Grub guidance tells me that the first partition on my disk will be hda1, the second will be hda2 - but are these the primary, extended or logical partitions? How do I do the counting? On one of my disks (I can't tell if it's the first or the second - even ignoring where the origin for counting is, zero or one) there are unallocated spaces between my partitions (according to Gparted). Are these spaces to be included in the partition count?
When it comes to fstab, I don't know if I should be setting my root disk as hda1 or hdc1 or sda3 or sdc5. There is insufficiently complete and unambiguous guidance. For somebody who is not fluent in Geek it is an unecessary source of stress in trying to make a Linux system work.