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From: nomail on 4 Jun 2010 21:06
Hello,

I finally got me a 3rd sata drive but now I can't use all 3 of them at
once. I never used more than 2 before and they were permanently
connected as sata-1 & sata-2. Only one drive is bootable, the others are
just data storage. I got an iStore 5-disk raid rail to act as a multiple
mobile tray dock, no problems with it that I could see (no raid is used).

The board is "asus a8n-e" and it has 4 sata connectors. The bios sees
all 3 sata drives as sata master 1, sata master 2 & sata master 3. All
fstab files use disk by device name (/dev/sda etc.) out of necessity.

Everything works so long as I have no more than 2 drives plugged in,
same as before: 1 has to be in position 1 and the other (if used) in
position 2. All other setups lead to failed boots.


If there is a 3rd drive plugged in

"Waiting for device /dev/sdX to appear: could not find device /dev/sdX
Want me to fall back to /dev/sdY? (Y/n)"


If any 2nd drive is not in position-2:

"Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"

Any hints would be appreciated. I tried to disable all IDE (pata)
features in bios but it doesn't seem to make any difference :-(

How can get up to 4 sata drives connected at once?

From: unruh on 4 Jun 2010 21:36
On 2010-06-05, nomail@_INVALID_no.org <nomail@_INVALID_no.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I finally got me a 3rd sata drive but now I can't use all 3 of them at
> once. I never used more than 2 before and they were permanently
> connected as sata-1 & sata-2. Only one drive is bootable, the others are
> just data storage. I got an iStore 5-disk raid rail to act as a multiple
> mobile tray dock, no problems with it that I could see (no raid is used).
>
> The board is "asus a8n-e" and it has 4 sata connectors. The bios sees
> all 3 sata drives as sata master 1, sata master 2 & sata master 3. All
> fstab files use disk by device name (/dev/sda etc.) out of necessity.
>
> Everything works so long as I have no more than 2 drives plugged in,
> same as before: 1 has to be in position 1 and the other (if used) in
> position 2. All other setups lead to failed boots.
>
>
> If there is a 3rd drive plugged in
>
> "Waiting for device /dev/sdX to appear: could not find device /dev/sdX
> Want me to fall back to /dev/sdY? (Y/n)"

Sounds like a drive labeling problem. Put in cd boot disk or a linux CD
system, and look to see what drives are found and what the labels are
for them.


>
>
> If any 2nd drive is not in position-2:
>
> "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"
>
> Any hints would be appreciated. I tried to disable all IDE (pata)
> features in bios but it doesn't seem to make any difference :-(
>
> How can get up to 4 sata drives connected at once?

No problem here. So it is something peculiar to your system.
What distro are you using?

>
From: nomail on 4 Jun 2010 23:24
On 06/04/2010 09:36 PM, unruh wrote:
> On 2010-06-05, nomail@_INVALID_no.org <nomail@_INVALID_no.org> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I finally got me a 3rd sata drive but now I can't use all 3 of them at
>> once. I never used more than 2 before and they were permanently
>> connected as sata-1 & sata-2. Only one drive is bootable, the others are
>> just data storage. I got an iStore 5-disk raid rail to act as a multiple
>> mobile tray dock, no problems with it that I could see (no raid is used).
>>
>> The board is "asus a8n-e" and it has 4 sata connectors. The bios sees
>> all 3 sata drives as sata master 1, sata master 2 & sata master 3. All
>> fstab files use disk by device name (/dev/sda etc.) out of necessity.
>>
>> Everything works so long as I have no more than 2 drives plugged in,
>> same as before: 1 has to be in position 1 and the other (if used) in
>> position 2. All other setups lead to failed boots.
>>
>>
>> If there is a 3rd drive plugged in
>>
>> "Waiting for device /dev/sdX to appear: could not find device /dev/sdX
>> Want me to fall back to /dev/sdY? (Y/n)"
>
> Sounds like a drive labeling problem. Put in cd boot disk or a linux CD
> system, and look to see what drives are found and what the labels are
> for them.

It IS but how come?

I got ahold of another sata so I could populate all 4 sata connectors.
The BIOS sees them all as they are and as they should be

1 - 2tb
2 - 320gb
3 - 500gb
4 - 2tb

So I booted the installation DVD (Suse-11.2-32bit) and faked my way in
to disk partitioning to see the offerings. That's where the numbering
really got messed up (that was a good idea to check with an install DVD)!

1 500gb /dev/sda
2 2tb /dev/sdb
3 2tb /dev/sdg
4 320gb /dev/sdh

I didn't verify this but I'm sure that with only 2 disks the first two
from the first list would be sda & sdb.

So if any of this is in effect when I boot disk-1 (sda) on which the
partition to boot is, somewhere along the boot it starts looking at the
500gb disk-3 instead. Now I'm even more screwed up.

The boot loader is grub-legacy. It works with (hd0,X) for sda so the
initially the boot's good. But when it gets to check the fstab saying
/dev/sda THEN somehow it goes for a dump and disk-3.


>> If any 2nd drive is not in position-2:
>>
>> "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"
>>
>> Any hints would be appreciated. I tried to disable all IDE (pata)
>> features in bios but it doesn't seem to make any difference :-(
>>
>> How can get up to 4 sata drives connected at once?
>
> No problem here. So it is something peculiar to your system.
> What distro are you using?
>
>>

From: Dr. Deb on 5 Jun 2010 00:47
nomail@_INVALID_no.org wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I finally got me a 3rd sata drive but now I can't use all 3 of them at
> once. I never used more than 2 before and they were permanently
> connected as sata-1 & sata-2. Only one drive is bootable, the others are
> just data storage. I got an iStore 5-disk raid rail to act as a multiple
> mobile tray dock, no problems with it that I could see (no raid is used).
>
> The board is "asus a8n-e" and it has 4 sata connectors. The bios sees
> all 3 sata drives as sata master 1, sata master 2 & sata master 3. All
> fstab files use disk by device name (/dev/sda etc.) out of necessity.
>
> Everything works so long as I have no more than 2 drives plugged in,
> same as before: 1 has to be in position 1 and the other (if used) in
> position 2. All other setups lead to failed boots.
>
>
> If there is a 3rd drive plugged in
>
> "Waiting for device /dev/sdX to appear: could not find device /dev/sdX
> Want me to fall back to /dev/sdY? (Y/n)"
>
>
> If any 2nd drive is not in position-2:
>
> "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"
>
> Any hints would be appreciated. I tried to disable all IDE (pata)
> features in bios but it doesn't seem to make any difference :-(
>
> How can get up to 4 sata drives connected at once?


I really hate to say this, but you may have a problem with your partition
information. I had a similar problem a little while back and the only cure
was to reformat.

FWIW

Deb
From: Jasen Betts on 5 Jun 2010 06:26
On 2010-06-05, nomail@_INVALID_no.org <nomail@_INVALID_no.org> wrote:
> On 06/04/2010 09:36 PM, unruh wrote:

> 1 - 2tb
> 2 - 320gb
> 3 - 500gb
> 4 - 2tb
>
> So I booted the installation DVD (Suse-11.2-32bit) and faked my way in
> to disk partitioning to see the offerings. That's where the numbering
> really got messed up (that was a good idea to check with an install DVD)!
>
> 1 500gb /dev/sda
> 2 2tb /dev/sdb
> 3 2tb /dev/sdg
> 4 320gb /dev/sdh
>
> I didn't verify this but I'm sure that with only 2 disks the first two
> from the first list would be sda & sdb.
>
> So if any of this is in effect when I boot disk-1 (sda) on which the
> partition to boot is, somewhere along the boot it starts looking at the
> 500gb disk-3 instead. Now I'm even more screwed up.
>
> The boot loader is grub-legacy. It works with (hd0,X) for sda so the
> initially the boot's good. But when it gets to check the fstab saying
> /dev/sda THEN somehow it goes for a dump and disk-3.

grub is great until you hit a circumstance where the BIOS and the
kernel disagree on the drive order numbering,

labeling the root partition drive and useing the label to mount
it is part of the solution. some other trick is needed to get
the boot sector written to the right place, but I forget what.

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