[Discuss] Disk numbering

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

2 weeks ago when I added a new 1.5TB ($49) HD to use as backup, my
drives were numbered sda, sdd, sde, and sdf. This prompted me to rewrite
my weekly disk health script to discover what drives are on my system.
All well and good. My /etc/fstab uses only UUID as does my RAID1. I shut
my system down last week when I went out of town for a couple of days,
and I found that the drives were renumbered again. I don't recall the
exact numbering, since I don't have anything that uses the drive numbers
other than my health script.  When I returned, I noticed an I/O error on
the new drive so I spent hours running fsck to bypass the bad blocks and
fix any errors. I'm watching closely to see over the next few days in
case I need to return the drive. After the fsck was completed, and the
drive tested good, I rebooted, and this morning I noticed another
renumbering (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd). The backup drive that was repaired is
still /dev/sdc. Now sda and sdb are the RAID1 pair.

I guess I am just ranting because I know the kernel assigns the drive
numbers at boot time and I don't need to know anything about the drive
numbers unless I need to run something manually. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
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