Strange Sata Hard drive order....

[Carlo1973]

I was wondering if anyone can help me with this. I asked this on an Ubunut forum about a year or so ago but got no response. I have an Asus M2NE-SLI motherboard. All my HDD's are Sata. I have 2 burners - both IDE. For windows, it see's my hard drives in the order I have them setup according to their cable placement on the motherboard (Sata ports 1-3, Sata 4 I have set for external sata). However within Linux - and I mean any linux distro I've tried (Gentoo, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, even Gparted) see's my Sata drives completly out of order.

For example:

Sata Port 1 - Primary HDD - 500GB
Sata Port 2 - Secondary - 500GB
Sata Port 3 - Secondary - 250GB

Windows see's them as drives C:\, D:\, E:\ Respectivly

Linus see's:

Sata Port 1: SDB
Sata Port 2: SDC
Sata Port 3: SDA

Or something like that. Its really messed up. Does anyone know what could be causing this? This causes all sorts of problems setting up a dual boot environment because Windows will place its boot loader on the Primary boot drive (Sata Port 1), Grub will install anywhere i tell it to, but because the drive order is messed up it breaks - unless I completely mess around with the drive order in the bios. I've resorted to putting Windows on one HDD, and Linux on an old external Sata for the time being, and use the Bios's Drive Boot Manager to select which drive to use. This is not the ideal way to run it.


Could use a bit of guidance on this one.

Carlo

[rcgreen]

I don't know why it acts that way. It may be a bug you will
have to work around. It could be that the kernel discovers the
interfaces out of order and assigns the names accordingly.

You should be able to set up the system to work reliably
without going in to the BIOS whenever you want to dual boot.
Regardless of operating system, the BIOS will give priority
to one hard drive to boot from. Once this is selected, you must
put the bootloader in the MBR of this drive, regardless of whether
the kernel calls it /dev/sda /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc

Your Microsoft OS is chainloaded from this in the usual way,
assuming Windows was installed first, then Linux, as most people
advise.

[Rubberman]

You need to label your partitions on the drives in Linux so you can mount using the LABEL=name option in /etc/fstab. The order the OS finds the drives can vary. I've had this problem as well, and the only reliable manner is to label the drive-partitions when you create the file system on them, or after-the-fact with something like the tune2fs tool.