I've had this strange issue for a while, and it took me a while to figure out what was happening. It happened on Ubuntu 8.*, went away on Ubuntu 9.* but unfortunately is back on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

The problem is that every time I reboot, the partition names get shuffled around. Specifically, from /proc/partitions/:
major minor #blocks name

8 0 244198584 sda
8 1 244196001 sda1
8 16 29316672 sdb
8 17 11550703 sdb1
8 18 15735667 sdb2
8 19 2024190 sdb3

You can see I have 2 disk drives. One is a 250G disk, /dev/sda, on which sda1 has an ext3 filesystem, and has my '/usr/home' directory.
My other disk a 30Gb disk, /dev/sdb/ has 2 major partitions, sdb2 which is my linux '/' and '/usr'

The problem I am having is that on a reboot, sometimes it assigns my 250Gb disk partition that contains my home directory, as /dev/sdb1, and at other times it gets assigned as /dev/sda1.
So every reboot I need to go into a recovery shell, and swap the 2 lines in /etc/fstab/

#/dev/sdb1 /home ext3
/dev/sda1 /home ext3

What a pain. Hopefully there is a way to work around this issue... Is this a "feature" or a "bug"?

Thanks for any tips.