Long story short I had 3 HDD's, now I'm down to 2. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on this machine and it's mounting the first drive as sdb and the second as sdc. Skipping sda. This is somehow stopping my first drive (Win) from booting. I get an error about it's UUID. Whats weird is if I run update-grub it will fix it, but then won't boot again the next day! So it's a morning ritual. I've compared my before and after grub.cfg's and don't see any difference but still can't figure out why the first drive isn't being called sda. But I think it has something to due with the fact this replaced my original sda (cloned). Any way to force rescan and reassign?

Greetings,

Are these drives defined in your /etc/fstab file by their UUID? Just wondering because the only time I've ever seen the system change the handles like that is when the drives aren't defined in fstab or don't have the UUID's called out.

Here's an example of what an fstab entry would like which includes the UUID of the drive, and you find your UUID with this command, sudo blkid ;

UUID=5555bc5a-5dba-50b5-a5f5-55555eac55c5 /media/7133bc7a-4dba-40b5-a8f5-94375eac82c2 ext3 defaults 0 0

Pardon me if this doesn't help. I hate to answer any of these zero reply topics because if I'm wrong then I wonder if the post will get as much attention, and I'm certainly not a linux guru.

Thanks for posting.

Be real, be sober.

yes, there exactly as your showing in your example

Does the UUID in your fstab match the UUID defined in the system devices?
Compare to fstab and adjust appropriately should they be different.

If this is a dual boot using a controller adapter on the PCI/PCIe bus, then you could also look at the hardware configuration there. Some controllers don't want to boot fron one SATA connection or the other under different circumstances and the order of the cards on a PCI bus can cause problems too. IRQ's can be an issue with different OS's.

Could also check that the boot order in the bios is set correctly.