Suse 10.3, shows my single ide drive as /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda
I don't know how that happened. I searched and found no reference
to my problem. Thanks.

There is no problem. OpenSuse 10.3 uses the 2.6.23? kernel. Somewhere around the 2.6.18 to 2.6.20 kernels, all drives (IDE, SATA, and SCSI) are called sd something-or-other. Grub still refers to IDE drives as hd and SATA/SCSI drives as sd. But, to the kernel, they're all sd.

Oops, double answer.

Thank you! I wasn't aware of that. It was confusing because I installed and use a couple of livecd's to see what they reported and "hda" was what came up. I thought I was missing something or did something wrong.

This might be a good thing if Knoppix upgrades to that kernel level. It always stops at the sata check for over a minute. If the kernel marks all drives as sata or sdx then that might allow Knoppix to pass much faster.

Opensuse has come along why since I installed version 9. I can't believe the speed also of OpenOffice.

I have a problem related to the above. I'm running Suse 10.1 which installed with kernel 2.6.16.??. I used online update, but have not installed all of the available updates yet, and find I now have 2.6.16.53-0.16-SMP. The problem is that the machine will not boot as it cannot find /dev/hda2 for a root filesystem, as that filesystem is now on /dev/sda2. I have not worked out the magic incantations of mount, chroot, mkinitrd, whatever to be able to get this system to boot again. Is anybody able to help? I'd rather not have to go back to a clean install if I can help it.

Thanks,
Scott

I have an interest in the hda/sda thing because of the way I have partitioned my hard drive. My 300GB hard drive has 24 partitions. The old parallel drive support easily allowed this, the new SATA driver wants to restrict me to 15 partitions. My gripe is that Linux usually has enabled me to do what I want. It is one of the few operating systems that even allows installation on a logical partition.
As part of an ongoing driver reliability upgrade Linus intends that the newer SATA support be the default even when the drive is PATA. SATA drives are currently limited to 15 partitions. I find it odd that when the size of hard drives is expanding I could find myself more restricted in partition options.
Attempting to install the latest Fedora failed on my hard drive. Apparently Fedora does not intend to allow any further support for more than 15 partitions.
A Mandriva 2008 install produced no problems at all.
My Suse 10.3 install told me to reboot and add hwprobe=-modules.pata as a boot option. It is currently installed and my drive is hda.
The latest Absolute Linux and Puppy Linux installed with no problem.
My understanding is that using LVM or running multiple operating systems in emulation are my options when presented with fewer partitions at the same time hard drives are available at 750GB and better.

To sbd

You may be able to repair things if you have a liveCD to boot. Mount the Suse partition, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Change references for root=/dev/hda2 to root=/dev/sda2.

Then edit /etc/fstab to change /dev/hda2 to /dev/sda2.

I think that would be enough to tell grub where the root of the filesystem is, and should boot.

I'm still in the middle of checking my 10.1 install on my laptop but I am wondering if one can get ahold of the modules.pata, load them at the boot menu and be good to go.

Okay, with the latest updates to my Suse 10.1 on my laptop which installed kernel 2.6.16.53-0.16-default my drives show up as hda with no further configuration from me. On this same system Ubuntu lists drives as sda with no problems. There are less than 15 partitions on this computer.
I had hoped to see if I was allowed to enter "hwprobe=-modules.pata" as a boot option, but it was not even needed in my case.

THANKYOU!!!

I had no idea about grub, so didn't even know to look there. I had already found and fixed /etc/fstab, but the boot process didn't get that far.

A liveCD is not required, as there are enough commands (just!) in the initrd filesystem, and certainly enough in the rescue environment on the original installation CD.

To help any future people who encounter a similar problem, note that (hd0, 1) must STAY that way, it's only the /dev/hdXn that has to change to /dev/sdXn.

Thanks,
Scott