I had a problem recently on Linux Mint 10 where my two hard drives, 40Gb and 500Gb, kept switching names. My 500Gb drive is designated sdb but for some reason keeps changing to sda and none of the applications that require the drive can find it!! After some investigation work I found that the problem disappears if instead of using sda, sdb etc to identify the drive you use the UUID. The UUID can be found by right clicking the hard drive and selecting properties.
So to rectify the problem open up fstab and change the hard disk ID. For example in my fstab file I changed dev/sdb1 to UUID=4955cac1-e8dc-43fb-82a9-867a4518edc4 . It is still mounted in the same place and it now longer switches its name.
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UUID is a great way to go for any drives that may get reconfigured.
I’m not sure how universal it is, but on kubuntu, there’s a directory called /dev/disk. Under it are several very useful subdirectories – by-id by-label by-path by-uuid. You can use these manually or from a script to find out what’s where (using something like ls -l to see the good stuff). If you put good labels (unique, human-readable, and meaningful) on your partitions, you can use them just like UUIDs, only much easier to type and remember.
You can use the by-label directory to find the device file to mount or mount even has a -L option that lets you mount directly by label.
Also, I don’t know how other file managers handle it, but when a new drive is plugged in, each partition on the drive is listed by its label in the places panel in dolphin and you can just click on one to mount it and see its files in one step. Right clicking on the places entry also gives you the option of safely removing (unmounting) the partition as well.
The trick is coming up with good labels for the partitions – things like root, home, and data are good names if you add enough other information so you know which computer the partition is usually used on. If there is more than one backup for a particular partition, then a number helps too.
My main notebook external drive has a partition on it named jm0ldata. The j says the drive is for my notebook (not my partner’s). The m is for mobile (a drive I carry with me as opposed to one that stays home). The 0 shows that this is the first drive (in case I make a copy of it to another external drive which would be 1…). The l is for Linux (the operating system usually used with this partition). And data is self explanitory. The partition is used for data that’s not used to run the system – like documents and media files.
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