Why do the new kernels from most distros insist on calling my IDE disks sd*? I have an IDE hard disk, IDE DVD drive, and some builtin memory card readers (which I understand connect through some kind of internal USB port), and all of them are now changing to sd*. (The memory card readers have always been sd*, but my IDE disks should be hd*). I compiled my own kernel on one of my systems just to get rid of this.

I've heard this has something to do with the new libata stuff in the kernel. Anyone know what exactly was wrong with the old IDE drivers? They've always worked fine for me...

Have a read of this.

Yes, that's my major problem with it. But I still don't see why the old IDE subsystem needed replacement in the first place...

Oh well. All it should take is a few fancy udev rules or symlinks.

Thanks for the link though.

The reasoning behind it is uniformity. Instead of handling some drives this way and some drives that way, it will move to handling all drives one way. In the end this will make life easier for us all. But for now we are going through "the oops we never thought of that" stage.