Hi,

I downloaded the full Suse 9.2 Professional DVD.iso and burned it on a double layer DVD hoping that I would upgrade easily to 9.2. Bad luck ! An error message at the very beginning (while yast cheks up the system) got me ice cold ! It seems that the root partition on my 120 Go serial ata disk is mounted as /dev/sda7 but in /etc/fstab it is repertoried as /dev/hda7.

If any gourou can give me a hand preventing me of backing up the whole stuff on W2k partition, Data partittion and the one (hde7) on which Suse 9.1 is installed I will be very grateful.

Thank in advance for your lights !


Below is the picture (!) of my hard disk :

Disk /dev/hde: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 * 1 5100 40965718+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hde3 5101 14946 79087995 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hde5 5101 12121 56396151 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hde6 12122 12383 2104483+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hde7 12384 14946 20587266 83 Linux


best regards to all

Can't you burn your data on CD? I'd always prefer a new installation over an update. This way your are sure to use all features of the new system. You could also create a tar backup of your data to preserve permissions and copy this to the FAT32 drive.

I guess the change from hde to sda comes from a different S-ATA driver (I noticed this when I changed from 9.0 to 9.1). I am not sure if there is a way to convince Yast to use the previous notification.

Thank you very much for your reply abisko00,
Since I have a lot of Data and miscillaneous programs and drivers (that exist for 9.2 also !) I try to minimize the effort. If I m obliged I will do a back up but wait for 9.3 !

all the best

When I upgraded 9.1 -> 9.2, it bounced because the way my SATA was handled changed - as you have identified - it is now seen as a SCSI - you will have the same problem in 9.3

Thank you very much for your interest and reply Gerry,
Now I'm just wondering whether I can or not make Suse consider my Serial Ata WD hard Disk as sda and not hda by finding another more suitable linux driver for this Sil3112 ! As soon as I've some more timi I'll check around.

Best Regards

If I'd been thinking, I'd have suggested this in the first place -

Since upgrading to 9.2 I've been doing a lot of work and thinking about multiple distro boots from one (SUSE) grub - Now, following broadly what I explain below, I can boot from the SUSE Grub menu into SUSE 9.2, Redhat 8.0 and RedHat 8.0 with updated kernel - I haven't used it to jump from hda to sda - but the steps below will create a sandbox where you can experiment with reasonable safety - and if you suceed in creating a SATA option in your Grub menu post back here...

A bit more preamble - when I tried to install RedHat 8.0 onto my SATA - it couldn't find it because the 2.4 kernel series didn't support SATA - so I stuck an EIDE drive in there as well - and after a bit of fiddling around - I rebooted into SUSE and panicked because I thought I'd lost X and a load of other stuff. In fact the boot sequence had started off with SUSE - and the mobo discovered a hidden preference for EIDE over SATA - so after loading everything from the /boot partition on the SATA it then looked for everything else on the / partition on EIDE - probably the world's first SUSEHat system. Once I set the EIDE drive to be a slave and set the mobo to first boot from SCSI over EIDE (I do not know if one of those steps was redundant) my SUSE system was restored to full health. The reason I mention this is to demonstrate how robust I found everything is providing I didn't overwrite things intentionally that I shouldn't have.

You can the following in stages and stop any time it looks like it's getting hairy - as ever, although I am speaking from new found experience you might prefer to do nothing at all, I suppose I'd better remind you it's your decision not mine.

Find menu.lst in /boot/grub and copy it to menu.play_with_this_copy_only in the same directory

Have a look at how menu.play_with_this_copy_only is organised. It references a number of linked files in /boot

The reason the files are linked is because they are generic placeholders for upgrades and changes - if you have upgraded the kernel in 9.1 since installing it, you should even see some .previous files which give a clue about the veracity of what I say next.

Find the files in 9.2 that are similar to the ones that are linked FROM (i.e., not the place holders) and shove them into /boot - if you stop now they will just be ignored (like the ,previous files) because nothing is looking for them

Edit menu.play_with_this_copy_only, by copying exactly the same block of text for a SUSE boot (the first block of text in the list) and adding it immediately below the existing entry

Once you are happy that you have created two entries in the list that are identical (including all the commented lines) you must decide if you want to do the next bit

copy menu.lst to menu.just_in_case_anything_goes_wrong
(and I've got a copy of knoppix to undo all my copying)

rename menu.play_with_this_copy_only to menu.lst

If you have carefully copied the SUSE menu entry (it's not brain surgery, just accuracy saves tears and grief) then reboot - you will see you have two "SUSE linux" entries on your grub menu - both doing exactly the same thing - but now you have got one (and only one) to play with. You have created a sandbox - and provided you only fiddle around with new files, and do not link them to anything - then your original SUSE 9.1 will be safe

Have a go at booting from either entry to convince yourself they both work (if neither work, then use you knoppix disk to restore your original menu.lst and give yourself a slap for sloppy editing...

From here on in its a combination of stuff and guessing Now it would depend on how things are organised but I suspect you need some extra entries in fstab:

in your second copy change all the entries that are pointing to the placeholder files and point them directly to the new equivalents from 9.2

I've got no idea if anything else needs to happen - but try and reboot from your second entry (remember it doesn't matter if you can't, you now know that you can reboot safely from your original entry) - I suspect that you won't be able to

Recalling that my set-up is likely to be different from yours, here's what my SATA driven entry looks like (and read some manuals - e.g., Chapter 8 of Linux Administration by SUSE)

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX 9.2
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda6 vga=0x31a selinux=0 splash=silent
resume=/dev/sda5 desktop elevator=as showopts
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd

and here's a chunk of my fstab file

/dev/sda6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/sda5 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0

Again make a copy of fstab for safe keeping and a copy to play with - you're a bit on your own here but if you can draw a sufficient number of parallels between your hda setup and my sda setup there might be room for success.

Let me know