ata controller problem

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:18:16 +0200, Gerhard Schmidt wrote:
> The Problem is that, if there is a Drive in one of the HotSwap Bays the
> PCI-Express controller is detected as ahci0 and the onboard is detected
> as ahci1. Therefore any drives in the HotSwap Bays become ada0-3 and the
> drives on the mainboard controller are the upper numbers which causes
> the boot to fail as the Root Partition isn't there where it's expected.
> The BIOS has the PCI-Express Card as second Card only so the Kernel is
> Booted but the RootFS is not Found.

You can use labels (GPT or UFS labels) or UFSIDs to become
independent of the actual device name where things are stored
on. You could also use this to make disks easier to identify
(e. g. "/dev/label/red1root" = the disk with a red "1" on it,
carrying the root file system).

I suggest those pages for more detailed information:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-glabel.html

Maybe as well (specific and general notes and inspiration):

http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=2666

http://www.freebsdonline.com/content/view/731/506/

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html

I assume that you are using UFS.



> Is there a way to ensure that the onboard SATA Controller is always
> probed first.

I'm not sure if this can be done, but using labels should
make the question go away, and the problem causing it. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...