On Wed, 28 May 2008, Eef Hartman wrote:

> Dominic-Luc Webb <dlwebb@canit.se> wrote:
> > # rdev vmlinuz
> > root = ox0805
>
> To me that is sda5 (first S-ATA or SCSI controller, 08, master, 0,
> partition 5), not hda1.
> /dev/hda is 0x0300, partitions are added TO that value.
>
> See also the numbers in the /dev directory for those device files:
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 0 2006-10-11 17:45 /dev/hda
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2007-09-24 19:42 /dev/sda
> ^^^^
> > # rdev vmlinuz
> > root = /dev/hda1
>
> That, of course, is much more readable and correct in your case.

It has been years since I paid much attention to block numbers.
I had better give exact details. Below is exactly copied and pasted
what pops up on my screen. Note that a grep for "sd" in dmesg gives
no hit, while hda is clearly identified. Hardware was checked and
is definitely IDE with ribbon cables. Regarding the 3,0, that
block was specified in the kernel panic when this system would not
boot. What you see below is for box that successfully boots from
harddisk via lilo:

root@melissa:/# rdev /boot/vmlinuz
Root device 0x0802
root@melissa:/# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb1 /old_NTFS_17May2008 ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
root@melissa:/# dmesg | grep sd
root@melissa:/#
root@melissa:/# dmesg | grep hda
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
hda: ST320423A, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 40011300 sectors (20485 MB) w/512KiB Cache, CHS=39693/16/63, UDMA(66)
hda: cache flushes not supported
hda: hda1 hda2
Adding 987956k swap on /dev/hda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:987956k


Dominic