[SOLVED] Drive numbering confusion

[litforver]

I attempted to install a fresh version of gentoo on my machine. Unfortunately I run into a little problem during the drive partioning stage and would like to clear it up before I proceed. Using the gentoo livecd my drives show up as hde1-3 (windows) and hdf1-3(linux) but when I run fdisk in my gentoo enviroment the drives becomes hda and hdb respectively. My question does it matter at all when I am partioning the drive that the lettering is wrong. Im worried about when I have to configure fstab as well as grub.

Im kinda lost as how I should proceed.

Thanks

[mrBen]

Drives are normally lettered according to their position on the physical IDE channels. hda and hdb would be normal for a master and slave on the primary IDE channel. I suspect that the LiveCD does some funny trickery with 'fake' drives that take up the normal slots.

It should (hopefully) be mentioned somewhere in the documentation.

[litforver]

I assume by manual you mean the livecd documentation and unfortunately I could not find anything.I only have two hard drives in my computer so Im not sure why the livecd is assigning hde and hdf to the drives.

[knute]

I assume by manual you mean the livecd documentation and unfortunately I could not find anything.I only have two hard drives in my computer so Im not sure why the livecd is assigning hde and hdf to the drives.

Do you have a promise card or similar IDE card installed that the linux drive is attached to?

It sounds to me like you have your windows drive attached to your motherboard's primary IDE controller (which would assign hda and hdb).
Since your motherboard's secondary IDE controller would assign hdc and hdd, that would leave hde and hdf for the primary controller on an add-in card. That would mean that your cdrom drive could be set as the master on the primary controller on the add-in card, and your linux drive would be slave on that controller.

That's just a guess, based upon what you posted.

[litforver]

I figured it out. I did have a pci card attached to my computer but no hard drives attached to the card, but once I removed the card the live cd recognized the correct configuration of my drives.

You were correct knute, it was the card causing me the trouble.