do hardware settings change when you reboot?
 

my uncle was explaining to me about my thumb drive before that each time i put it in the mount point or something would change because as you plug in hardware they can get assigned to new mount points or something. I think he said i had to change some stuff in the boot config so that it would stay the same. I did some stuff to fstab to make it mount but is that going to be enough or was i just interpeting him wrong cuz it was over my head?

Well, I don't keep my USB drive plugged in. But when I plug it in it is always /dev/sda1

I don't know what your uncle is talking about.