Feb 15, 2013

openSUSE Forums: Problem with hard drives...

openSUSE Forums
openSUSE Forums
Problem with hard drives...
Feb 16th 2013, 05:36

Hi everybody. I really hope somebody here can help me, cause it's causing me some serious headaches. I have a Thinkpad W530 with a Crucial M4 mSATA SSD and a Travelstar 7k750 HDD. I tried to install several distros while both hard drives were in my computer, but no distro would succeed to install a bootloader on my mSATA SSD. But it really bothers me, because I wanted to have it on this drive, and not on the HDD (even thought it's my primary drive), because I want to use the HDD for storage only, not for system boot. So I want to be able to switch it with other drives anytime I want without losing my bootloader. So basically:

/dev/sda - Primary drive, used for storage only
/dev/sdb - mSATA SSD, used for OS(es) and bootloader

To work around the problems, I removed the HDD from my computer for the time of the installation. I succeeded installing every distro I wanted, including the bootloader, except for openSUSE, which bootloader installation failed every time I tried, no matter the bootloader type I chose or its settings. So, to work around this other problem, I installed openSUSE on my biggest partition, without a bootloader, and on a smaller partition, I installed Backtrack, which bootloader I used to boot on openSUSE. Until then, everything worked. I then updated openSUSE, couldn't boot it anymore and used Backtrack to repair GRUB once again. My /dev/ now looks like this:

/dev/sda - mSATA SSD

Now, here's the tricky part that gives me a headache: now that the installation is finished, I reinstalled my HDD in my computer. Pretty simple, there's only one screw. But here's the problem: the bootloader points to openSUSE properly, openSUSE starts to boot, and then... stops booting. Apparently, the kernel seems fine, but something else can't find its way around anymore, and I'm not sure what. All I know is that it's searching for files on the wrong drive. Obviously, the /dev/ reverted to what it was first. openSUSE is trying to find files on /dev/sda, while they are in fact located in /dev/sdb. Since the physical address of the drives will change with the presence or the absence of the main HDD, isn't there a way to make openSUSE find the right drive? Per example, GRUB doesn't get messed up because it uses UUID instead of /dev/sdx. I also checked my Backtrack installation, and everything's fine.

So, why can't openSUSE not find my drive anymore, and where can I change the address of the drive manually to fix it? I'm pretty sure all I have to do would be to change /dev/sda to /dev/sdb somewhere in a configuration file.

Thanks for anyone who can give me a cue.

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