[nmglug] Using Media Bay Devices In Dell 600m With Fedora Core 3

[William D. Nystrom]

Hi Sam,

Your suggestions solved the problem for me.  I've now been able to boot
with the media bay hard drive installed and was able to successfully mount
it and explore it.  Thanks for your suggestions.

I guess this solution now raises a couple of other questions.  When I get
through transferring my files over to my primary drive, one option I am
considering is moving that primary hard drive over to the media bay hard
drive caddy.  The hard drive that I am working with is actually a second
hard drive that I bought for this laptop.  I also picked up a couple of
primary hard drive caddies and the media bay caddy off of ebay to make my
experimenting easier.  So, the original plan which I had in mind was to
have the original laptop hard drive set up for my family in the primary
hard drive bay and then have the second hard drive which has my stuff on
it set up in the media bay.  Then, I set up the BIOS to first check for a
bootable media bay hard drive so that I boot from it when it is installed.

So, I'm assuming that the "label" approach in fstab and grub.conf would
work in either of the two locations i.e. primary hdd bay or media hdd bay.
I'm assuming that my current setup would not work in either bay and that
if I switch my primary hdd over to the media bay that I would have to edit
fstab and grub.conf and switch hda to hdc.  Does this make sense or have I
misunderstood what is going on?

Thanks again,

-- 
Dave Nystrom
LANL X-2
Phone: 505-667-7913
Fax:   505-665-2227
Email: wdn at lanl.gov
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       Group X-2
       Los Alamos National Laboratory
       Los Alamos, NM 87545

On Tue, June 7, 2005 2:26 pm, Sam Noble said:
> On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 13:46 -0600, William D. Nystrom wrote:
>> > Sounds like the problem is that you've got two drives both using
>> e2label
>> > and your fstab and probably your grub config are trying to use those
>> > labels rather than actual device names.
>>
>> Thanks for the info.  It seems to me that /etc/fstab is actually
>> getting
>> written when I reboot with a different configuration.
>
> The fancy project utopia stuff (udev, hald, pmount, gnomeVFS
> etc.[Karlheg seems to know this stuff real well and probably knows which
> actual 'thingy' is coming in to play here.]) is probably only making
> changes for the removable devices so I'd go ahead and make the changes
> by hand for all the /dev/hda devices.
>
>> >
>> > kernel          /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791
>> > Not:
>> > kernel          /boot/vmlinuz root=Label=/ ro vga=791
>> >
>> > and in fstab you should have stuff like:
>> >
>> > /dev/hda6     /usr      ext3    defaults,error...
>> > Not:
>> > Label=/usr    /usr      ext3     defaults,err...
>> >
>> > See?
>>
>> This seems like a simple thing to try.  Is this a good thing in
>> general to
>> do or should I save the original copy of grub.conf and restore it
>> after
>> I am done with this exercise?
>
> I'm not a fan of using Label=x in config files. I think the flexibility
> it provides is easily overshadowed by the likelihood of it causing
> problems. For instance I don't know a way to get a kernel to boot on a
> system with that syntax in fstab without using an initrd. Or your
> problem here is another 'for instance'. And I don't think it works at
> all in software raid setups. So in total I'd say make the switch to
> specific /dev/x entries and never look back. But of course a
> grub.conf.BAK file hanging out in /boot/grub is not going to hurt
> anything so feel free to back it up for peace of mind :)
>
> --
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