boot priority of disks with raid and non raid volumes
 

Hi,

Recently, I purchased a server with S5000VSA board, Intel Quad processors and separate intel raid card.
I have 1 TB sata disk onboard as a boot drive and 8 Nos. of 1 TB sata drives with raid card as RAID5 for data. While installing RHEL 5.3 it detected RAID5 as sda instead of sdb and 1 TB sata drive as sdb. When I checked the mother board BIOS, harddisk priority is set to 1 TB sata disk.
My question is why 1 TB is not detected as sda.
pls let me know your sugesstions

Just some thoughts...

Linux loads its RAID controller driver before the driver for the internal controller. This could be the root cause of your troubles. I don't know how to influence the order of loading drivers.

Assuming that is the root cause, this doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. With the correct boot loader configuration you will never be bothered again.

Or you can consider moving the the single 1TB disk from the internal to the external controller and try to define the boot order from within its BIOS.

Hope this helps.

I can tell you for sure that the motherboard's boot order is totally irrelevant in determining drive device file mappings. udev decides what order disks are discovered in and in what order they are given letters.

So, if you really want to change them - which isn't a big deal, since you should be mounting by LABEL= or UUID= anyway - you need to mess with udev. Here is a link that will help; ignore the title and actually understand the info in there, and it looks like you've got enough to create the file that will cause udev to give your disks a specific letter. YMMV, as they say. Feel free to come back if you decide to undertake this challenge and run into any snags.