On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Ken Teh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> During a kickstart install, how are drives mapped?  I notice that sata0 is
> not always sda.  This is especially true when there are very large drives in
> the mix.

It Depends(tm). There are confusing difficulties because the drive
controllers may be pre-loaded modules, which will be loaded first, and
because the later updates or manual drivers compiled for custom
kernels may be loaded in different order or pre-loaded with mkinitrd.
Then as drives or RAID arrays which look like drives are detected by
the bios starting and loading the drivers from the *boot* partition
for adiditional controllers, they're loaded in by the order detected,
first drive /dev/sda, second drive /dev/sdb, etc., etc. This is why
the boot loader is usually on "/dev/sda"

IDE drives used to  be listed as "/dev/ide0, /dev/ide1, etc." in
deterministic fashion, but that got tossed out when they started
labeling all drives as /dev/sda to gove access to special SCSI
compatible commands.....

The result is that it's guesswork. This is why our favorite upstream
vendor tried for a while to use "LABEL=" settings to identify
particular partitions, instead of trying to deduce what would be
detected where.