[arch-general] archlinux hardware question

[Matthew Gyurgyik]

On 11/28/2010 05:59 PM, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> A sled drive puts an internal drive into a sled case.  Then the user 
> slides the sled case along tracks installed for that purpose into the 
> computer and in order to use it must lock the drive with a key.  You 
> can put operating systems on different hard drives that way and if one 
> gets compromised pull it out and replace disk to keep running.
>
> On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Damjan wrote:
>
>>>  Has anyone managed to get archlinux up and running on either a sled
>>>  drive or a full-sized usb drive yet. Another Linux system I have
>>>  couldn't even detect the disk drive was in the machine and I gave 
>>> it my
>>>  best hard drive too. Slackware has no problem with the drive, but 
>>> Debian
>>>  squeeze or an earlier edition of lenny squeeze had problems too.
>>
>> What's a "sled drive"?
>>
>> Anyway, when the LCD broke on my main laptop, and I sent it for a 
>> repair, I took out the hard drive, put it in an external USB box and 
>> hooked it up on an Asus EEEpc 701.
>>
>> Except that I had to update the initramfs to include the usb drivers 
>> (ehci_hcd, uhci_hcd, usb_storage, sd_mod) I don't remember doing 
>> anything else special.
>>
>> fstab was already configured to mount by uuid, grub2 too.
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> ??????
>>
>>
Please do not top post.

It sounds as if you are describing a hot-swappable drive. Something like 
this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994054

If that is the case then the kernel should just have to support your 
SATA chipset. As with a USB drive you should just need to provide the 
needed usb kernel modules as Damjan stated in yoru initrd file. Edit 
/etc/mkinitcpio.conf and run mkinitcpio -p kernel26