On Tue, 4 Jun 2013, Goh Lip wrote:Okay, understood what you mean.Your bios did not detect both drives and the first drive it detected was put into the boot sequence.sorry, but I think that you didn't understand: my BIOS perfectly detects allexisting drives, as 1/ they are all listed in the BIOS "general" and "hard disc" menus 2/ I was able to put the good one in the boot sequence.3/ I imagine that if a disc is not detected by the BIOS, it's difficultto use it in the OS, after the boot.You also said that the "disc numbering is not consistent with each reboot" This is not true for internal discs.So, the use of UUID in fstab is mandatory for external drives, but not for internal.best regards,
Just one reference... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID First paragraph reads.." Linux now prefers to use UUID (Universally Unique Identifier), LABEL, or symlinks to identify media storage devices on a system. Directly using /dev/hd*# or /dev/sd*# is no longer preferred since these device assignments can change between system boots:"
I had experienced in the past my grub-legacy keeps pointing to the wrong drive. Found out it was the bios. So, in your case, what detects as sda would be first in the sequence. One more link to illustrate.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=89282But glad to know your bios detects all drives. Your message just put one drive besides the rom. Phew. That would be really bad.
Oh, a link on ide and sata. Don't know if you have the mix. http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php?title=Grub_with_IDE_and_SATA_Drives Cheers. Hope the above helps.