UUIDs on drives

[Mario Vukelic]

On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 11:24 -0600, ghe wrote:
> Disk controller software used to call SCSI drives sda... and the IDE's
> hda... 

"Used to" being the instrumental expression.

> When I set the SCSI ID to 0 on my system (boot) disk, it'd be
> called sda -- all the time -- 

Yes, that was back then. As I understand it, now that we have SATA and
whatnot, this is simply not guaranteed by the hardware anymore.

> and grub's menu.lst and fstab would never
> have a problem. When I bent something, I could at least boot the system
> and fix it.

But you can still tell grub from which partition to boot.

> Then somebody had the brilliant idea of calling everything sd... Now
> whatever is scanned first, SCSI, IDE, SATA, USB sticks, whatever, gets
> called sda. Very poor.

It's not that somebody came up with the idea to rename things just for
the heck of it. The kernel developers decided that all these devices
should be handled by the SCSI subsystem. It's certainly possible to
disagree with this decision, but someone dong so should be prepared to
take it up with the kernel developers on their level.

That said, I agree that the this detail should be better abstracted in the GUI.

> udev was supposed to fix this, I think. But the installer(s) don't build
> the rules, so when I installed Heron on my Mac Pro the other day, then
> turned on an external SCSI disk, then updated Ubuntu's kernel, I got to
> reinstall Ubuntu.

Huh?

> It looks like Ubuntu's got fstab fixed and menu.lst sorta fixed (it
> still refers to the BIOS' (hd0,1) -- don't know, but that may be a
> problem with grub). Getting there...

I'm attaching external disks all the time and I never had this problem,
so I don't know what the problem here would be. Why _reinstall_?