I've just figured it out - thanks to Aaron pointing me in the right 
direction.

This mobo has a raid controller built in. Now, the system at boot time, 
boots from the onboard *normal* ide controller. The drive is wd0.

By the time the kernel loads, it's obvious that the raid controller is 
actually pciide0 (I read the output of dmesg again and realised that cd0 
was on pciide1 - can't see the wood for the trees!!) so I needed to 
specify in the installation to use wd2 which was wd0 up until the kernel 
loaded!!

A little confusing, and definitely a problem. Is there a way to map the 
drives so that they're not going to move. If I disable the raid 
controller, my disk becomes wd0 again, which will fail during boot-up. I 
can see a situation making a reboot difficult with a bad disk on the 
raid controller.

Thanks,
Jason.

Jason Quigley wrote:

> Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 12:20:28AM +0100, Jason Quigley wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Still, maybe it *should* be alright, but in fact, it's not. What is 
>>> that root_device?
>>>
>>
>> it's the device the kernel booted from.
>>
>> kaben2$ ls -l /kern/rootdev
>> brw-r-----  1 root  operator  4, 8 Sep 19  2000 /kern/rootdev
>> kaben2$ ls -l /dev/sd1a
>> brw-r-----  1 root  operator  4, 8 Sep 19  2000 /dev/sd1a
>>
>> since you have /kern mounted, look at the major and minor of your
>> /kern/rootdev device and then look to see what the corresponding device
>> in /dev is.
>>
>>
> 
> Hi Aaron!
> 
> ls -l /kern/rootdev:
> 
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 16 Dec 7 17:13 /kern/rootdev
> 
> ls -l /dev/wd0a:
> 
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 0 Dec 7 17:13 /dev/wd0a
> 
> ls -l /mnt/dev/wd0a (wd0a mounted on /mnt):
> 
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 0 Dec 7 22:05 /mnt/dev/wd0a
> 
> I didn't touch anything, I just did a standard install per the 
> documentation.
> 
> I find that "ls -l /dev/wd[0123]a" returns:
> 
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0,  0 Dec  7 17:13 /dev/wd0a
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0,  8 Dec  7 17:13 /dev/wd1a
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 16 Dec  7 17:13 /dev/wd2a
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 24 Dec  7 17:13 /dev/wd3a
> 
> /dev/wd2a corresponds to /kern/rootdev. So, should I experiment by 
> mv'ing some of these /dev (or /mnt/dev) files around?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Jason.
> 
>