hello everybody.

i've got a very strange problem concerning the detection of my ide-harddrives and the cdrom drive. i have plugged 2 ide hdd's to the first connector on my mainboard and a cdrom drive to the second connector. after installing debian my harddrives should be detected as hda and hdb, as well as hde for the cd-rom drive.

but now i come to my problem. sometimes the harddrives are detected as hde and hdf and cdrom is hda -> so i cannot start my system, because it looks for root on hda, but its placed on hde now. after rebooting i have a 50 % chance that debian detects my drives in the right way and it boots from hda (root) correctly.

my mainboard: asus p5w dh deluxe

is there a solution for this problem or do you have similar experiences with your ide drives?

yours,
hplgonzo

You can reference drives in lilo/grub by uuid also.

You can find the uuid of any given drive by doing:

vol_id -u /dev/name

(eg on my server vol_id -u /dev/sda1 returns the uuid for it)

Then in grub for the root= line you change it to:
root=UUID=xx-xx-xx-xx whateveroptionsyounormallyhave

That will make it end up the right drive each time... you can also specify uuid in other places like the fstab.

So basically, boot once, get the uuid of the drive, set it in grub's conf, reinstall grub to mbr, and reboot.

thanks a lot for your help rweaver.
that solution works absolutely fine !!!
i really had no idea how to solve that problem, but know everything runs perfectly without any error messages or reboots ...