The Gentoo live-cd shows my drives as "hda", but booting into my own kernel shows "sda" (therefore, boot fails). What should I do?

The Gentoo live-cd shows my drives as "hda", so I followed the Gentoo handbook and configured my partitions as "hda". However, the boot failed because, when booting into my kernel, it wanted to refer to the partitions as "sda".

So, I edited my fstab and grub's menu config file to refer to partitions as sda, and everything booted successfully.

Was this the right thing to do? Any other steps you would recommend regarding this? Is it surprising to you that a new minimal Gentoo livecd would refer to things as "hda" in the first place? And if so, do you suspect there may be some issues I need to resolve?

Thanks!

That was the correct thing to do. The Gentoo LiveCD may have been using the IDE driver instead of the SCSI driver for your (I'm assuming) SATA hard drives. Slower, but guaranteed to be reliable. You shouldn't need to do anything else; your system is stable.

Play with the SATA options in the BIOS - AFAIK "Combined" mode lets you access IDE or SATA (so different kernels can do different things... think it changed ~2.6.18) - try enhanced mode, and I think you'll get SDA all round, assuming the older kernel manages it ok, which it probably will.

Edit: FWIW, SmoothWall (where I work) found this on the UTM hardware we use - and there was a BIG difference in performance (hda was much slower)

Edit2: yes, I agree with previous poster - you did right. Check you are getting decent disk performance with:

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

and if it is ok.. leave well alone :)

HTH,

Tom