2011-03-10

mirgating to libata

Since IDE/MFM/RLL is now depreciated, I thought I'd share my experiences of migrating to the newer libsata (SATA prod) drivers in 2.6 kernel.

Since I only have 2 devices on IDE ports (WD 320Gb HDD and a cdrw), there was very little for me to do as I had just about everything spread across both ata and libsata, so I removed all instances of ata, set built-in ATA driver support (since the system boots from IDE - for now) under libsata and enabled what I needed as modules for my SATA JBOD's

The whole thing almost went perfectly as planned (and as documented), except for the following minor irritations:

  1. Forgot to change the real_root option in grub.conf from /dev/hda3 to /dev/sda3 :-P
  2. udev was naming my cdrom to cdrw1/cdrom1

Admittedly, it took my a while figure out that I forgot to change the bootloader for the change in device names, but I quickly worked out how to change the cdrom device name back to default, by editing "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules"

 
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