notes on 2.4 -> 2.6 upgrade with a Serial ATA root

notes on 2.4 -> 2.6 upgrade with a Serial ATA root

[Eric Wong]

When using the 2.4.22-xfs kernel (Knoppix -> Debian installation), our
SATA root drive shows up as /dev/hdg, but under 2.6, it's now a SCSI
device, /dev/sda.  It took us a while to figure out what was wrong until
we finally got a serial line and were able to read the boot message
outputs.

This is the error message we got originally _before_ we appended
"root=/dev/sda3" to our command-line:

VFS: Cannot open root device "2203" or unknown-block(34,3)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option

I have a feeling this will take a lot of SATA users by surprise, so
hopefully it'll be documented from now on.

-- 
Eric Wong                                        eric@yhbt.net
Petta Technologies                         eric@petta-tech.com

Re: notes on 2.4 -> 2.6 upgrade with a Serial ATA root

[Erik Steffl]

Eric Wong wrote:
> When using the 2.4.22-xfs kernel (Knoppix -> Debian installation), our
> SATA root drive shows up as /dev/hdg, but under 2.6, it's now a SCSI
> device, /dev/sda.  It took us a while to figure out what was wrong until
> we finally got a serial line and were able to read the boot message
> outputs.
> 
> This is the error message we got originally _before_ we appended
> "root=/dev/sda3" to our command-line:
> 
> VFS: Cannot open root device "2203" or unknown-block(34,3)
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> 
> I have a feeling this will take a lot of SATA users by surprise, so
> hopefully it'll be documented from now on.

   you can use SATA drives as scsi drives on 2.4.x kernels too (I use it 
with 2.4.21-ac4), actually at least in my case it's better because when 
I try to use it as IDE drive the system freezes (during probing IDE, 
right after it prints out the info about disks).

	erik