hi,

i have yesterday installed a second HDD. a poor days ago i installed Linux with HDD's connected like this:

6GB Drive as Secondary Slave on IDE
120GB Drive on Raid Controller (unpartitioned)

i repartitioned the 6GB Drive while installing Linux.
After installing the drives where marked as /dev/hdh (6GB Drive) and /dev/hdd (the 120GB Drive).

i have then taken the 120GB out to transfer my data from another drive that was not connected while installing on another machine to the 120GB Drive partitioned as one FAT32 Partition.

i then connected the 120GB Drive as Secondary Master (not on Raid as before).
During boot the Linux Kernel paniced with the error:

cannot mount /dev/hdh2 as root

i then started rescue to look what happend and the situation was as followed:

the 6GB Drive was not any more /dev/hdh strangely it was now /dev/hdd and the 120GB Drive was now /dev/hdc

i thaught that this was happend because the new drive was connected before the 6GB Drive (120GB was master and 6GB was slave) so i connected them revers (6GB was now Master and 120GB was Slave) and rebooted.
the strange result: same result! 6GB was yet again /dev/hdd and the 120GB drive was /dev/hdc.

so i went to rescue console, connected /dev/hdd2 as /mnt and looked for a file that has "/dev/hdh" in it and i found it in the /boot/grub. i edited the file and rebooted the system.

after reboot the kernel panic was not anymore but the system hang up because it could not find some files...

any suggestions what went wrong? i am often connecting new hdd`s and then removing them and i don't want that i can set up the complete system again every time...

Distro is SuSE 8.2

ok, basically it used your raid as ide0-1 and your other as ide2-3
the raid has no drives didn't initilise and now boom hdh becomes hdc, in the lilo or grub boot type:

(imagename - usually linux or mandrake or kernel version)

sorry here is command:

boot: (imagename) root=/dev/hdc2

then edit the /etc/lilo.conf or /etc/grub.conf to change hdh to hdc

in Grub you may also have a line that says

root (hdx,x)

Just point it to the correct place as you've done with the kernel line.

Also look at /etc/fstab, as this will have your mount points on redirect them to the correct devices.

If you've overwritten stuff on the drives your knackered and in for a new install.

that line in grub i replaced by the correct values but i forgot the /etc/fstab files... thanks for answer..