Hiho!

I have a problem. I built a Raid5 volume with 3 SATA II hard disk drives. Further I have a system disk conected through IDE. During the first setup the IDE disk becomes sda, the SATA II disk sd[bcd] respectively. Now, sometimes the device names change after reboot - why ever... E.g. one of the raid5 disk become sda and so I got an error message during the boot procedure regarding the raid set.

Curious, when the system is up and I stop and restart the Raid5 volume it comes up and runs fine. ^^

Because I'm currently at work I can't post any more detailed config files at the moment. But maybe this is an know issue and someone can help me already.

Regards
OK

Because USB and other Harddrive devices can be dynamic, and the "/dev/sd*" is not guaranteed on each boot. Use the UUID mount opiton, the UUID is assigned to each device based on what HAL gives it. The UUID will always be the same on every boot for that device.



To check what UUID was given to the USB drive or ANY other Disk attatched to the system

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

Check what UUID is linked to the "/dev/sd*" you are looking for.

Then edit/create an entry for it in your FSTAB

vi /etc/fstab

Entry looks like this;

UUID=5EA6A6DFA6A6B6C5 /mountpt type defaults 0 0

This sounds like a good tip. I'm going to check it when I'm at home. But I still don't understand why the system can start the Raid5 volume without any problems - although the device names are still "incorrectly" - after I stop & start it manually. I thought the parameter DEVICE partition in the mdadm.conf should check for valid raid information on all partitions and start the correct Raid volume automatically.