I'm running Slack64 13.37 with two SATA and two IDE disks in my pc. Root partition is reiserfs on sda1 (SATA disk 1) with generic kernel and initrd loading reiserfs module. Everything fine so far. Now I wanted to add another SATA disk for storage and slack refused to boot:


The error occurred with a 3TP GPT disk as well as with a 1TB MBR disk. The funny thing is when Slack is running and the disks were hotplugged they are accessable. And why does udev wants to mount /dev/sda1 on /mnt and not on / as usual?

It looks like something in initrd is missing so I created a new one using AlienBob's "mkinitrd_generation_script". There was no difference to the previous initrd: reiserfs module was loaded and rootdevice has been set to /dev/sd1, nothing more.

Can someone help me in this or point me in the right direction?

A wild guess: make sure the boot order you want is the same as the actual SATA ports. That is, be sure the SATA drive you want to boot, the one you originally installed 13.37 and the initrd, is actually connected to SATA port 1. The kernel and udev assign device nodes based upon the discovery order of the physical ports on the motherboard.

You might have been lucky before with your boot disk on SATA port 2 and the other SATA onport 3, but then you connected the new drive to SATA port 1.

Another option is to use UUIDs in fstab.

Thanks Woodsman, that sounded promising, but:

The SATA drives and ports were in the correct order. I switched port 1 and 2 just to see what happens and got the same error (without the new disk attached). So I switched back the ports and used UUIDs for all partitions in fstab, even for the new disk which I hotplugged after boot. I also created a new initrd. No success at all :-(

Would it make sense to compile a new kernel with reiserfs support built in and not using an initrd?

Another guess: Check your BIOS boot device order. Perhaps when you add the third SATA drive the BIOS is placing that drive first in the boot order.

I got it. Your wild guess wasn't that bad. I don't fully understand why but sata port 4 is recognized as SCSI ID 1.0.0.0. Connecting the boot disc to it did the trick. The other device names are mixed up now but I will figure out how to put them back in the right order. It's a bit confusing because even the IDE discs are named /dev/sdX but I can modify fstab if necessary.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

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Sorry, you're right. Done.