Re: hard disk device name change after reboot

[Owen Townend <bowbowbow@optushome.com.au>]

On Sun, 2007-11-04 at 13:55 -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 10:49:49PM +0800, hhding.gnu wrote:
> > hi list,
> > 
> > I run Debian 4.1.2-13 on Dell PowerEdge 650 with kernel
> > 2.6.21-2-686. When I install the debian, the device name of partition
> > is hda1, hda2. After install, I reboot it for times and it works. One
> > day, I find it fail to reboot, after waiting for root filesystem for a
> > while, Debian drop to shell(busybox). Then I notice the device name of
> > hard disk has automaticly changed to hde1,hde2. some times, the
> > devices name is changed to others like hdg1, hdg2, etc. after reboot.
> > 
> > What's the problem then? Can I fix the device name? Any clue for it
> > is appreciated. :-)
> > 
> 
> Not sure specifically what is causing this problem, but in the
> meantime, switch to using LABEL's or UUID's to identify disks. That
> way you can continue booting until you figure it out.
> 
> A

Hey,
  To elaborate, vol_id can get the uuid for a volume which you can then
use in fstab. Eg this ntfs sata disk partition I called 'Y' in windows.
  $ sudo vol_id /dev/sda1
  ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
  ID_FS_TYPE=ntfs
  ID_FS_VERSION=3.1
  ID_FS_UUID=4862AAF824AADB2F		<--This part
  ID_FS_UUID_ENC=4862AAF824AADB2F
  ID_FS_LABEL=Y				<--Or this part
  ID_FS_LABEL_ENC=Y
  ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=Y

This then translates to a line like this in /etc/fstab

  # /dev/sda1
  UUID=4862AAF824AADB2F   /ntfs/Y ntfs-3g
rw,user,users,gid=users,umask=0002,en_AU.utf8   0       0

or 'LABEL=Y' would also work.

Doing this for all volumes renders device name changes a non-issue.

Hope this helps.
cheers,
Owen.

PS/NB: My linux partition uuids look slightly different e.g.
e029093d-b95f-434a-b005-ab4f807e2ca8
As generated by uuidgen.