How can I load sata_nv before amd_pata on Hardy

[Tom H]

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Nigel Henry <cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr> wrote:
>
> I added an 80GB pata harddrive to my machine that already had 2 sata
> harddrives. Only Hardy seems to have a problem identifying it as sdc, and
> instead lists it in fdisk -l as sda. Hardy boots up ok, perhaps due to the
> use of UUID's, but kdiskfree (I'm using Kubuntu) lists / as sdb13, which
> should be sda13, and /home is sdb14, but should be sda14. Also I have no swap
> now, as swap is on sda3 (the first sata drive), but the pata drive is now
> sda, and sda3 on that is a FAT32 data partition. There are also desktop icons
> for accessing mounted FAT32 partitions on sdb, and sda, but because of Hardy
> now having the wrong ordering of the drives, these no longer work.
>
> There are a bunch of other distros on this machine, and none excepting
> Archlinux had a problem when I added the 80GB pata drive. Dapper, and Gutsy,
> with no libata showed the pata drive as hda, and Intrepid which has libata
> shows it correctly as sdc. The Fedora installs also show it as sdc. I fixed
> the problem on Archlinux by adding earlymodules=sata_nv to the kernel line in
> Grub, but Archlinux uses mkinitcpio, not initramfs, and that command doesn't
> work on Hardy.
>
> So what I'd like to know, is how to fix the problem so that sata_nv is loaded
> first, and the 2 sata drives are correctly identified as sda, and sdb, with
> the added pata drive as sdc.
>
> I found a lot of different commands for the initramfs, but nothing about doing
> the above, and I've never messed with initramfs before.

(Two options that I can think of; others may have better/simpler ones...)

1.  Write udev rules to associate sda/sdb/sdc with the correct drives
using their "/dev/disk/by-id" values and rebuild the initrd with those
rules. I'd suggest some rules if I still had a Hardy box but I only
have access to Lucid/Maverick/Natty and the udev syntax has changed
since Hardy. I'm also glad that I can't help because these things are
a PITA and the few times that I've had to write some, I was happy to
forget how to write them. :)

2. Use UUIDs for swap and the desktop icons (if by "desktop icons" you
mean aliases that you've created).