First sata device is sdc?

[dsopscak]

I'm trying to install Fedora 14 to coexist with a long established Fedora 10 installation. The system has six sata drives. My existing installation sees those drives as sda through sdf, as I'd expect. The Fedora 14 installer sees them as sdc - sdh. This is somewhat troubling. There are two software raid1 devices: md0 on (sdb, sdc), and md1 on (sdd, sdf). Fedora 10 lives on sda and I plan to install 14 on sdf. The Fedora 14 installer recognizes them all, including the raid devices, in order, but all are incremented by two letters.

I went ahead and installed it with Grub on the MBR of the first drive, and it seemed to recognize the old installation and I hoped it would dual boot them, but it wouldn't boot at all. I managed to get the old grub back and things working as before, but it was hair-raising, and I'm wondering if the problem was related to the devices being off.

Why would they be off like that? Is the situation an obstacle to having the systems live together?

Thanks!

[stoat]

Originally Posted by dsopscak

Is the situation an obstacle to having the systems live together?

You're probably long gone from here, but I don't think it will be a big problem. That drive enumeration business has become a little unpredictable. I think it's the reason we have UUIDs instead of device names in grub.conf nowadays.

Actually, Anaconda (the Fedora installer) is good about adding Windows to the GRUB menu, but it is well known to ignore existing Linux systems, even other Fedoras. But it's generally not hard to tweak grub.conf to make it boot another Linux system. Anyway, too late for that for Fedora 14.

If you have Fedora 10 booting normally again, then you can tweak Fedora 10's grub.conf to boot Fedora 14 using the configfile menu command. If you want to try that, then open a terminal and start the GRUB shell...

su
grub

At the grub> prompt, use the find command to determine the Fedora boot partitions...

grub> find /grub/grub.conf
grub> find /boot/grub/grub.conf

Do both. One or both may produce errors that can be ignored. And one or both will produce results that will be the Fedora 10 and Fedora 14 boot partitions (or root partitions if no separate boot partitions). You have to figure out which is 10 and which is 14. It's usually not hard to do that. Anyway, now open Fedora 10's grub.conf for editing and add this at the end...

title Fedora 14
configfile (hdx,y)/grub/grub.conf

You change x & y to the drive & partition learned with the GRUB shell's find command. Or like this if Fedora 14 does not have a separate boot partition...

title Fedora 14
configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/grub.conf

Choosing "Fedora 14" in the Fedora 10 menu should go to the Fedora 14 menu and then to Fedora 14.

If you don't want to go through a second menu and prefer to directly boot the Fedora 14 kernel from the Fedora 10 menu, then copy the title, root, kernel, and initrd lines for the latest kernel in the Fedora 14 grub.conf file to the Fedora 10 grub.conf. Repeat that when the Fedora 14 kernel is updated.