F9: Mounting of drives

[Dan Thurman]

When one starts with the first drive in the system (no other drives
exist), one may get /dev/sda as the first drive in the system.  One
proceeds by installing all of the F9 software, perform updates, and
all of that, everything seems to work well.  I note that I have many
Sata ports from which I can install this drive on, and it seems that
no matter which port (of 7 ports available), the result is always the
same - the first drive appears as /dev/sda.

When satisfied with the first drive, I decided to add a 2nd raw drive
to the system, rebooted, I noted that the 2nd drive became /dev/sda,
the first (original) drive became /dev/sdb.

Ok, I had to keep this in mind, and proceeded to clone (backup) the
first drive (/dev/sdb) to the 2nd drive (/dev/sda) using `dd'.

But what follows is interesting.

The clone of the drive was interrupted due to a malfunction as I was
installing Ndiswrapper for a Wifi device, and the system abruptly
rebooted, leaving an incomplete clone, containing all but /, /boot,
and swap on the 2nd drive.

On reboot, as it happened, /, /boot, and swap was mounted from
/dev/sdb but the interesting part is that /App1 which exist on
both drives, /dev/sda5 was incomplete but had partial music files
and /App1 on /dev/sdb5 had full music files was mounted as follows:

/dev/sda5 mounted on /media/App1   (incomplete)
/dev/sdb5 mounted on /media/App1_

Of course, I found out why Amarok was complaining that my selected
playlist had missing files since it was based on /media/App1 and sure
enough that is how I discovered this mounting scheme.

So, the question is, why is there such a "flip" to begin with and
how does one ensure that the first (original) drive remains intact
and not overridden by the 2nd or other drives that were added
later on?

Keep in mind that the labels of the drives are the same - so is the
answer to this problem is to assign UUID or something or is this
controlled strictly via the BIOS?

Thanks!
Dan