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With every boot my HDDs randomly change places, as in sometimes my root partition is on sda, while other times it books on sdb.Its really not bothersome as I use UUID for fstab and such, but its really just annoying. Does anybody know if there is a way to keep it from changing? I am using an IDE drive and a SATA drive.

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The kernel gives no guarantee that these devices will retain the same device node names (ie, sda, sdb, etc) when the machine is booted. The names depend on the order in which the devices are discovered, which can be arbitrary.

This is exactly why we use the UUID and/or labels where possible. If you want to reference a specific disk, the symlinks in /dev/disk/by-* might be useful for you.

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Yes, I already know that. But I would think there would be some waqy to help control which which id detected first, considering one is SATA and the other is IDE. – Vladashram Aug 21 '12 at 1:03
The important point here is that the order is arbitrary. The kernel probes for ATA (ie, SATA and IDE) devices in parallel to reduce boot times. This means that there is no specified order. Is there a reason you don't want to use the symlinks? – Jeremy Kerr Aug 21 '12 at 1:55
No real specific reason, I just think it would be a little more orderly. I often use UUID. Thank you for your help. – Vladashram Aug 21 '12 at 8:12

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