Installer and installed system differ in disk enumeration

["A.E.Lawrence" <A.E.Lawrence@lboro.ac.uk>]

Sata disk enumeration and installer on amd64
--------------------------------------------

I have an ASUS a8n-sli Deluxe mbrd populated with 6 hard disks:-

a) 1 scsi 
b) 1 IDE on pata (legacy, parallel ata
c) 4 sata

1) Disk enumeration differs between installer and installed system
------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a problem with enumeration of disks because the installer and 
the target system differ.

The installer (kernal presumably) allocates
  /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd  to the sata disks
and
  /dev/sde   to the true scsi disk.

The target system (for which the installer has written and incorrect
/etc/fstab) instead allocates the scsi disc first:

   /dev/sda   to true scsi
  /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd and /dev/sde  to the sata disks

Presumably the installer kernal and target kernels load modules in a 
different order.

Resulting problems:
------------------

a) The grub menu.lst (presumably similar for lilo, etc) has the wrong
   root parameter passed to the kernel:

     root=/dev/sdc1    [wrong]   instead of
     root=/dev/sdd1

b) The target system has an incorrect /etc/fstab entry of the root 
   filesystem, so needs to be  modified before the installed system can
   be properly booted.

Installer did not allow corrections:
-----------------------------------
Once alerted to these problems, I could find no easy way to modify these
values from a shell on an alternative terminal (alt-f2) in the installer.
I could not find a /dev/.. entry on which to mount the target root 
filesystem.


2) Suggestion (up to installer team?)
------------------------------------

With such a large number of discs, it is very easy to become confused 
bewteen discs and partitions. Suggestion: the partition labels should
be displayed where present. (I didn't find e2label in an installer shell).

ael