I have a minor problem. I have an Asus A8N-SLI which has 4 nForce SATA ports and 4 SiImage SATA ports.

Grub sees the disks as (hd0) up to (hd5) which 0,1,2,3 being the nvidia SATA 1,2,3,4 and 4,5 being SATA 1,2 on the SiImage, which is what I would expect.

When I boot the kernel however, they get mappend like this:

NVidia SATA 1 (grub 0) -->/dev/sde
NVidia SATA 2 (grub 1) -->/dev/sdf
NVidia SATA 3 (grub 2) -->/dev/sdc
NVidia SATA 4 (grub 3) -->/dev/sdd
SiImage SATA 1 (grub 5) --> /dev/sda
SiImage STAT 2 (grub 6) --> /dev/sdb

This is a pain, since I often switch disks in and out of the system. I boot from NVidia SATA 1 (grub 0) and if I remove any of the hard disks, all the entries in fstab, the grub root device configuration have to change.

Is there any way I can get the kernel to probe the disks in a specific order so that I can ensure that my boot disk is /dev/sda?

Thanks

Take a look at udev. With the proper rules set up you can have it detect individual disks and create dedicated device entries for them. It won't help you with anything you do before boot-up, but you'll certainly be able to have a consistant fstab.

See here for more on udev:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/util...plug/udev.html