USB storage and scsi disk device name woes

[Marcel Weber <mmweber@ncpro.com>]

Hi

Since some weeks I'm having a strange problem on my SID box. This
computer has a scsi storage subsystem with two disks. On sda there's a
windows installation and on sdb the said Debian SID installation.

The problem appears when I attach an USB storage device, before booting:
This makes the device name of the disks change: The USB device appears
as the first four scsi devices (sda up to sdd because it's a four slot
flash card reader) and the scsi disks become sde/sdf. This produces a
kernel panic, because the root filesystem cannot be found. When booting
without the USB Device, everything works as supposed. I'm using lilo as
boot manager.

Now the question: Is there a sensible way to tell my system in which
order these scsi devices should appear, or is it just at random? If yes
this would solve my problem.

Any help is appreciated!

Regards

Marcel