[tlug] Gentoo install issues - hda vs. sda

[Mark Makdad <makdad@example.com>]

TLUG,

I inherited and old box from my office last week and decided to experiment with Gentoo (as opposed to Ubuntu, which I've been running on my desktop).  While I have Googled my way through the problem, I'd like to share my war story in hopes of helping someone else.

Booting with the minimum install LiveCD, I configured the Gentoo system step-by-step according to their website how-to.  After finishing the last step and rebooting, I found that I couldn't get very far: the kernel would poop out telling me it couldn't find my main partition, /dev/hda3.  (boot was /dev/hda1).

It said that I needed to pick from the list:  /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, or /dev/sda3.  Yet, I have no SCSI devices in this box, and when I booted with the LiveCD, everything was /dev/hda!

I thought, "well, if I just change fstab and grub, I should be able to boot?".  Running the LiveCD again, I was unable to get grub to install using /sda because it didn't believe /sda existed (because we were in the hda environment).

Eventually, I hacked fstab and grub.conf enough to be able to get the system running (of course on /dev/sda3).

I assume that I changed something between my kernel and the LiveCD kernel -- does anyone have any idea what I did?  While I am up and running now, I'd rather avoid this sort of thing down the road should I have to re-install.

Cheers

Mark