On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:16, Artem Trunov<[email protected]> wrote: > This second machine also has an IDE drive, but a different > brand, which is recognized as sdb (sda is bootable usb stick), not > hda.
It is worth mentioning that sd and hd have nothing whatsoever to do with the brand of drive, and they actually also have nothing to do with what type of cable is in use. What actually decides whether you get sd or hd device names is which driver you are using to access that storage. In the past, IDE had different drivers than did SCSI and SATA. The IDE drivers used hd the sata and scsi drivers used sd. The IDE driver names related to exact positions. I.E. hdc was ALWAYS the secondary master. Even if there was no primary master or slave. Today libata is the most commonly used driver. It includes support for most ide and sata controllers, and libata happens to make sd device names. libata (and AFAIK all block storage controller drivers using the sd namespace) just assign starting from a in the order detected. Which letter you get should be considered to be completely arbitrary and volatile. Instead of referencing /dev/sda1, reference LABEL= or /dev/disk/by-*/*. Those methods will be stable across reboots and hardware changes.
