Question about multiple hard drives and /dev

[pontifor]

Hi,

I have 5 hard drives in my machine. Each time the machine boots, it is possible for the logical names to be different..? I don't understand this, I reference those logical drives ( i.e. /dev/sdb ) in my fstab file and that works until I reboot.. I think there is something basic I am missing..

thanks,
Stefan

[Morbius1]

Yes they can. That's why the default way is to use UUID's.

If you want to see what the UUID's are for your partitions then run the following command:

sudo blkid -c /dev/nullYou'll get an output that looks something like this:

/dev/sda1: LABEL="WinXP" UUID="DA9056C19056A3B3" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="COMMON" UUID="C4DB-C1B0" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="a6c223bf-f9dc-49a7-9b86-ac8729e95369"
/dev/sdb6: LABEL="Data" UUID="f7927995-b098-42be-ada0-987857f5177a" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdc1: LABEL="BACKUP" UUID="66E4DC83E4DC56C1" TYPE="ntfs"
So if you have an fstab entry that starts with say:

/dev/sda1 /some-mount-pointYou would change it to:

UUID=DA9056C19056A3B3 /some-mount-point

[pontifor]

Thanks!!!