Ok, this is a really obscure set of questions.

Background:
I have an Intel Dual Xeon SE7525GP2 motherbord running Fedora. The purpose of this machine is Data acquisition for various law enforcement organizations. In addition to the normal IDE and SATA channels on the system it has a Adaptec Ultra133 card along with a Adaptec 293020 SCSI card. These cards are run into removable harddrive bays. Four bays for various IDE devices and two for the SCSI line.

Question 1-
The system boots off an internal SATA harddrive without a hitch, until one of the other drives is introduced to the system via the removable bays. It stops booting even before the Kernel starts to load, which makes me assume the system has reallocated the devices in /dev and my /boot/ partition is no longer located at /dev/sda1 as it should be. How can I tell the system that no matter what happens or is introduced to it that my internal SATA drive *must* be /dev/sda ?

Question 2-
If I can get the system to boot properly with extra devices hooked to it, is there a good way to manage the constantly changing file systems/number of drives/types of drives that will be introduced to it? Ideally it would be nice for the system to just boot and detect what lines have drives. From there determine what file system is on the disc and mount it onto an easy to access mount point.

Question 3- Just to make things more confusing, it has a USB based memory stick reader and will need to mount a USB keychain at certain times. Is there a utility that will tell me what device in /dev an item is being detected on so I can manually mount it if needed? Fedora has about a billion entries in /dev and with this many devices that could be names the same thing it makes it very hard to determine which device is where.

I realize this will end in the fstab from hell, but any pointers or help anyone can throw me would be awesome.

1. use a boot disk OR check to make sure only your boot and root partitions are auto mounted.
2. you should be able to setup your fstab to contain the random drives, just set them to not auto mount and then you can mount/unmount when you want.
3. Check out this page for your USB drive:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1256766,00.asp

To summarize your problem...

As I see it the OS will load the SCSI modules before the SATA modules so your SCSI drives will be assigned first. And the first recognized disk will be sda, the next sdb and so on. The same thing goes for your USB drive. It will be assigned a /dev/sdx when the modules are loaded in the boot sequence and assigned a sdx.

I only have a rudementary understanding of all of this... There might be a way to change the order using the scsihosts boot parameter using grub.

http://www.linuxpowered.com/LDP/HOWT...mlbparams.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...-2.4-HOWTO.pdf