F9: Mounting of drives

[Dan Thurman]

Tim wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 10:54 -0700, Dan Thurman wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I'm going to ask the obvious question:  After adding the second drive,
> and noticing the change, did you try swapping the ports the drives were
> plugged into?  (To make your first drive back into being /dev/sda
> again.)
>
> I saw UUID later in the thread, and that'll help you with Linux, but not
> GRUB.  You'll have to deal with getting the right drive, separately, to
> begin booting a system.
>
Yes, I did.  I tried all 7 Sata ports and they all behaved the same
way.  This blew me away.  Perhaps Sata ports have no unique
position identifier, such as "I am Sata port #1", ... ?

I do not know the hardware/software internals as to how Sata
ports are scanned and in which order if there is an order at all.
I don't know how the BIOS scans ports either but I would bet
that if I had a PATA (IDE) drive, it would come first off as
/dev/sda (or is it /dev/hda?) long before SATA gets scanned,
but don't hold me to this assumption! ;)

As for UUID. I found thast tune2fs -u random <device> was
the way to place UUID on a partition.  I haven't tried it yet but
will do so as soon as the VERY slow dd clone completes a
750GB transfer at 3.0 MB/sec rate - it's gonna be a long
night.

Thanks!
Dan