Grub problem with SATA drives

[Pedro Bezunartea Lopez]

Tim wrote:
> > You, now, have two SATA drives plugged in at the same time? For
> > interest's sake, what happens if you swap their data connectors
> > around? I would have expected something like that to be the solution.

Thanks Tim. Yes, I have both drives plugged in at the same time. I haven't
tried to swap the connectors yet. I wanted to have the new disk be sda
because the old disk is failing and will probably be replaced soon, so I
didn't want to have the new disk changing from sdb to sda when the bad
disk fails. In any case, what would that test accomplish? it'll probably
swap linux, and grub drive names.

Hadders wrote:
> Umm, I think you'll find the problem goes deeper than that. When you did
> a fresh install, the other drive didn't exist.
> So Fedora LABELLED your new partitions the SAME as the old disks.
(...)
> That will list all the paritions. sda is Port 0 on the mainboard, sdb is
> Port 1 You can then type e2label /dev/sda(x) where x is the number
> corresponding to your linux partitions.
> This will simply LIST the volume labels
> You should only have ONE root (/), so to relabel it, the command is the
> same, but with the new label on the end, e.g e2label /dev/sda3 / will
> relabel parition 3 as root (/)
> Hope that helps

Thanks Hadders, that was one of the problems which I already fixed by
changing the grub.conf file so it doesn't use the LABEL parameter: kernel
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 ro root=/dev/sda5

More details:
The disk sda is plugged in the SATA 2, and sdb in the SATA 1 (!!) of the
mainboard.
Mainboard: QDI K8V800 VIA K8T800 VT8237 chipset
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor
RAM: 1GB
>From dmesg I get the following for SATA:
scsi0 : sata_via
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 156301488 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
scsi1 : sata_via
ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata2.00: ATA-6, max UDMA/133, 156301488 sectors: LBA48
ata2.00: ata2: dev 0 multi count 16
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133

And from cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: ST380211AS       Rev: 3.AA
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: ST380013AS       Rev: 3.18
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05

The disk connected at scsi0 (ATA-7) is sda, and the one connected to scsi1
(ATA-6) is sdb.

I'm not sure which information is relevant to make sense of all this.
Thanks again,

Pedro.