Bug 88809 – Misnamed SATA hard drive device node on x86 2005.0 LiveCD

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Chandler May 2005-04-11 21:37:01 UTC]

I have a Western Digital "RAID Edition" 160GB SATA hard drive and a Tyan S3560 (i7520) motherboard. The hard drive is attached to the primary SATA port on the motherboard; previous installations have proven this.

When I booted the LiveCD, everything worked great but I could not get it to recognize /dev/sda (which is what I used with 2004.3). I tried /dev/sdb, and it worked (it recognized the existence of the disk, and its contents - a FreeBSD partition).

After installation, the kernel panicked on first boot, claiming a bad "root=" parameter. I booted back into the LiveCD, changed all instances of "/dev/sdb" to "/dev/sda" in fstab and grub.conf, rebooted, and everything worked as expected.

Logic leads me to believe there is a bug in the x86 2005.0 LiveCD that misnames certain device nodes (like my SATA hard drive) on certain platforms.

Note, I installed 2005.0 from the same CD on another computer with a Maxtor SATA hard drive and an Asus P5AD2 motherboard, and this bug did not appear.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Obtain my hardware configuration
2. Boot from the x86 2005.0 Gentoo LiveCD
3. fdisk /dev/sda

Actual Results:  
The LiveCD did not recognize the hard drive at the proper device node, /dev/sda.
It recognized it at /dev/sdb instead.

Expected Results:  
The LiveCD should have recognized the hard drive at the proper device node,
/dev/sda.

I have a Western Digital "RAID Edition" 160GB SATA hard drive and a Tyan S3560
(i7520) motherboard. The motherboard is a rather new dual-Xeon platform with
EM64T support.

[Comment 1 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-04-12 04:28:39 UTC]

Did you have any other devices attached that use linux's SCSI interface?  Anything USB/Firewire?

What output do you get from "dmesg | grep sda" from the Install CD?

[Comment 2 Chandler May 2005-04-13 21:59:39 UTC]

Sorry for the delay - I didn't want to interrupt portage. ;-)

#####
$ dmesg | grep sda
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
#####

I have a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. I also have a USB printer - HP PSC 2210 - but I don't even think it was connected during install.

[Comment 3 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-04-14 04:18:14 UTC]

Could you possibly post the entire dmesg as an attachment?

It definitely looks like we are loading a driver which is binding to a device that is not being loaded in your configured kernel on the installed system.

[Comment 4 Chandler May 2005-04-14 14:34:51 UTC]

Created attachment 56298 [details]
dmesg

Here is the `dmesg` output from the problem machine.

[Comment 5 Chandler May 2005-04-14 14:40:31 UTC]

Upon further investigation (after parsing output from dmesg), I booted the LiveCD with the printer (HP PSC 2210) unplugged to find the hard disk device node labeled appropriately - /dev/sda.

[Comment 6 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-08-15 12:21:29 UTC]

Does your printer have any slots on it for flash-based media?  I'm just trying
to figure out why it stole the device node.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that you discovered the source of the problem.  Feel
free to REOPEN this bug if you feel it needs more investigation.