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Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 12:14 am
by purplebic
I tried LMDE, im really excited about the concept :-) i like distributions that are as close to the source as possible, instead of being dervived from another derivation :P

But...
I noticed a major bug in the way LMDE identifies my hard drives.

Specs:
1 IDE 160gb hard drive houses all the system partitions, (XP, and linux), plus a 100gb ext4 partition for music and pics
1 SATA 1000gb hard drive contais a 950gb ext4 partition for videos (television and movies)

Problems:
A) during installation, i wasn't able to create a mountpoint for the other drive, only mountpoints for the drive the system was going to be housed on. I had to get pysdm to create a mountpoint for the SATA drive.

B) and this is really what i'd call a major bug, on every boot, the system switches the identifiers for the drives,
1st boot: IDE drive labelled as sda, SATA drive as sdb
2nd boot: IDE drive labelled as sdb, SATA drive as sda
3rd boot: IDE drive labelled as sda, SATA drive as sdb
so on and so forth.

I had to install grub on both drives to be able to boot, otherwise i only sucessfully booted every second attempt.

I also remember having the exact same problem a year ago when i last tried vanilla Mint. (the plain gnome, ubuntu based distro).

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I do not have this problem running any of the Ubuntu versions, and Crunchbang (debian base) doesn't pose a problem either. It's something with the Mint installer.

~Freddy

Re: Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 1:08 am
by caf4926
I never bother setting up mount points in Mint because it will just work anyway.

I always use custom partitioning to assign the install to the correct partitions.

Grub 2 is always perfect for me, never fails.

Re: Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 7:33 am
by altair4
B) and this is really what i'd call a major bug, on every boot, the system switches the identifiers for the drives,
You might want to move away from /dev/sdxy to UUID or LABEL as the device identifier. Those won't change unless you reformat the partition. The following command will list each physical partition and their description:

Code: Select all

sudo blkid -c /dev/null
For example on my NTFS partition it will show:
/dev/sda1: LABEL="WindowsXP" UUID="DA9056C19056A3B3" TYPE="ntfs"
I don't think pysdm is smart enough to know about UUID's or LABELS's so it might have produced the following line in fstab:
/dev/sda1 /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
Just change it to one of these:
UUID=DA9056C19056A3B3 /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
LABEL=WindowsXP /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

Re: Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 10:06 am
by purplebic
caf4926 wrote:I never bother setting up mount points in Mint because it will just work anyway.

I always use custom partitioning to assign the install to the correct partitions.

Grub 2 is always perfect for me, never fails.
Congratulations. but Grub2 isnt the problem, the fact that the system looks for it on the wrong drive every other boot, is.

and being able to set up mountpoints during install is just plain common sense. Every other distribution makes allowances for it.

Re: Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 10:14 am
by purplebic
You might want to move away from /dev/sdxy to UUID or LABEL as the device identifier. Those won't change unless you reformat the partition. The following command will list each physical partition and their description:

Code: Select all

sudo blkid -c /dev/null
For example on my NTFS partition it will show:
/dev/sda1: LABEL="WindowsXP" UUID="DA9056C19056A3B3" TYPE="ntfs"
I don't think pysdm is smart enough to know about UUID's or LABELS's so it might have produced the following line in fstab:
/dev/sda1 /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
Just change it to one of these:
UUID=DA9056C19056A3B3 /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
LABEL=WindowsXP /WinXP ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
[/quote]

I can only do what the installer offers me as options, moving away from /dev/sdxy doesn't seem to be an option during install. Its pretty hard to start playing with settings post-install if the system only boots half the time.

Im already aware that i can manually set fstab.

Im simply letting the maintainers know there's something wrong with their installer, and the end result is that their distribution does not work out of the box, which puts it at a disadvantage with other similiar distributions like Ubuntu and Crunchbang <-- (which i reinstalled). Weather or not they fix it is up to them, i wont be fiddling in text files when i dont have to jump through hoops in other distributions.

Re: Problem identifying hard drives

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 10:49 am
by reference2myself
I having the same problem not being to set mount points for any drive but the one you're installing too, can't even set /home as a partition on a different drive. The installer makes you choose a single drive to work with. The installer also still doesn't recognize raid setups after installing mdadm and setting them all up.