Arch Linux

zellux

Member

Registered: 2007-09-12

Posts: 6

Disk device changes after each rebooting

Hi, all

I have a SATA disk and an IDE disk on my desktop machine, and I've installed Win7 in the SATA disk while ArchLinux in the IDE, the grub is installed on the IDE disk.

In ArchLinux /etc/fstab I set the root mount device as /dev/sda2 instead of /dev/sdb2, as detected in ArchLinux setup program.

However, every time I boot from grub into ArchLinux, there will be chances that initrd cannot read from /dev/sda2 since it seems that /dev/sda is the Win7 disk instead of the ArchLinux one. But sometimes it works since /dev/sda becomes the ArchLinux one. In other words, whether the ArchLinux disk is /dev/sda or /dev/sdb differs after rebooting.

I'm wondering if it helps to use UUID to choose partition instead of device path. And is there any other solution to this problem?

Many thank

grey

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-08-23

Posts: 679

Re: Disk device changes after each rebooting

I'm wondering if it helps to use UUID to choose partition instead of device path

Yes.

And is there any other solution to this problem?

You can use file system labels.

The wiki entries on grub and fstab have the details.

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Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

panosk

Member

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2008-10-29

Posts: 241

Re: Disk device changes after each rebooting

I am plagued with this issue as well in my desktop PC. I solved it by adding UUIDs in fstab, so I have no problems in booting. But I think this issue is screwing resume from suspend to RAM. When I try to resume, I get a ton of error messages with filesystem and node problems and I have to hard reboot, so I suspect that the kernel assigns different drive letters after resuming. I googled a lot for this and I found that it is a kernel misbehavior that remains unsolved. Can you verify that resuming from suspend doesn't work for you too?