Hi,

I've got a server with intel S5000PSL motherboard and six sata drives. In my current installation, the drives are assigned from /dev/sda to /dev/sdf.

Now i'd like to boot my server using external usb hdd (for some testing purposes), but it seems the drive is assigned ti /dev/sdg only if it's plugged in AFTER linux starts booting (the same goes for installation DVD, hdd was assigned to /dev/sdg).

If i plug it in befor restarting server, and trying to boot from it, it's assigned to hd0 in grub (and of course it won't boot, sice it can't find files it's looking for on hd6).

My fixed hdds are assigned to three raid1 arrays. I'm afraid i could break something if I boot from usb hdd as hd0, since all /dev/sdx would be messed up and i guess my arrays could fail (which is a big no-no).

So the question is, what can I do to make linux see external drive as hd6 /dev/sdg??

Thanks
Jernej

by 'hdd' here, you mean "Hard Disk Drive" or "/dev/hdd"?

any hard drives connected externally are assigned /dev/sd* even if its an IDE hard drive.

From this, i could assume that its an IDE hard drive which had an old system and u are trying to boot that system.

In case you will connect this hard drive as an external hard drive, this cannot be done.

But if you really insist on booting this system from that drive and you have IDE interfaces on the motherboard you could connect the hard drive to it.

If you want to use the hard drive as an external hard drive and boot from it, you will go through some steps.
1. adjust /etc/fstab on the hard drive u want to boot from.
2. adjust grub to boot correctly from that drive