Re: USB storage and scsi disk device name woes
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:50:46 +0200, Marcel Weber wrote:
> Since some weeks I'm having a strange problem on my SID box. This
> computer has a scsi storage subsystem with two disks. On sda there's a
> windows installation and on sdb the said Debian SID installation.
>
> The problem appears when I attach an USB storage device, before booting:
> This makes the device name of the disks change: The USB device appears
> as the first four scsi devices (sda up to sdd because it's a four slot
> flash card reader) and the scsi disks become sde/sdf. This produces a
> kernel panic, because the root filesystem cannot be found. When booting
> without the USB Device, everything works as supposed. I'm using lilo as
> boot manager.
>
> Now the question: Is there a sensible way to tell my system in which
> order these scsi devices should appear, or is it just at random? If yes
> this would solve my problem.
Try using labels or UUIDs to recognise the devices you mount.
# e2label /dev/sdb1 root
or
# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdb1 | grep UUID
Filesystem UUID: 502a2a27-6b08-43f2-82f9-99b0af7c6e26
Other filesystems will hopefully have similar utilities that let you label
them or discover their UUIDs.
Once you have a label or UUID, instead of referring to "/dev/sdb1" in
/etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.list, specify "LABEL=root" or
"UUID=502a2a27-6b08-43f2-82f9-99b0af7c6e26".
If you have udev installed, it will use this information to create
persistant symlinks in /dev/disk that you can use as well.
--
Sam Morris
http://robots.org.uk/
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