Hard Drive Order

geek warning

I added a drive to a computer yesterday at work. First of all, I really like SATA over IDE, not only for performance, but the cables are much easier to deal with in a crowded machine and no jumpers to play with. That said, the drive I added refused to come up in the BIOS. It turns out I was hitting the wrong key for selecting the SATA port settings. Duh!.

The computer had two drives in it already. This was the third. I added it, after figuring out the key combination, and it came up as /dev/sdb, kicking the existing second drive to /dev/sdc. The drives were plugged in to the system board in order, so some other mechanism is used to determine the /dev/sd? order.

After digging a bit, the solution is not to use /dev/sd?.  In new Linux distributions there is /dev/disk/by-path or /dev/disk/by-label that will get you around some of the problems above even when using USB disks, which I've hit the same trouble with recently.

This doesn't help me with the older systems. It seems like you have to write every script fifteen times to overcome the disparity between OSes. Nothing works for everything. This is a time where the autonomy of Windows winds out. Even though the crappy batch and scripting environment of Windows is limited, it does offer one stop shopping on many fronts. Even Microsoft has to move forward, thus breaking the way things work. They just take their sweet time about it. Open source moves in leaps and bounds compared to most of the grinding lumbers of Old MS.

How many times have you booted your system with a USB key plugged in and your DVD disappears? That kind of crap still happens.