Well, I'm not panicked, but the kernel apparently is. I just added a 160 gig harddrive to my Athlon XP system. I attached it to one of those ATA 133 PCI cards. I thought, "No problem, I've done this before on my Duron system." The Duron system saw the new hardrive as HDE and I was in business. Well, first I try to book and I get KERNEL PANIC and the system won't boot. Then, I throw in Knoppix and it appears that my new harddrive is identified as HDA. Well, that threw EVERYTHING off. Original harddrive is HDE, DVD is HDF, CDRW is HDG, and so on. I'm not even sure where to start fixing this problem.

Is it possible to make linux re-identify all the hardware the way I want it to?
Or do I have to live with it? I considered changing LILO and fstab, but I'm not sure that would do the trick, as all the device symlinks would have to be updated also, right? I'm not even sure how to change LILO without getting "into" the system. I'm at a bit of a loss here. Anyone have a bit of advice? Thanks!

Akshun J

When you installed the new ATA card the four new disk addresses should have been hde through hdh. Linux does not control what hardware address is assigned to each ATA slot. That is controlled by the BIOS.

On some BIOS it is possible to rearrange the addressing of the ATA slots, which is what appears to have happened here. I suggest that you go into your BIOS and try to reconfigure your disk addresses.

If that doesn't work and you want to make Linux work on your current disk addresses then you boot a rescue system and change lilo and fstab. You should not have to change any symlinks unless you have symlinks to /dev/hda through /dev/hdh, which would be unusual.

If you are using IDE-SCSI then you would also have to change your boot append parameter.

It would seem that LILO was actually was taking it's info from the ATA card BIOS, which kicked in and detects the attached drive AFTER the mobo BIOS kicks in, but BEFORE LILO takes over. The mobo BIOS looks to my old hard drive to boot LILO, but somehow the ATA card BIOS tells LILO that the new hard drive is the first device in line for /dev/hda status. Weird and confusing to say the least.

To fix things, I booted Slackware by manually typing in the "root=/dev/hde" option. Worked like a champ. Then I changed the "root" AND "boot" options in LILO, as I realized that if I didn't change "boot", it would have installed LILO to the MBR on /dev/hda instead of /dev/hde where I needed it! I rebooted, and VOILA! Good ole slack is back, and all my devices work as they should. Thanks for all the help...

--Akshun J