need better standard drive partition identify method
 

Some Linux will name the internal drive partitions as; hda1,etc, while other distributions will call them as; sda1, etc. And if you have a SATA external hard drive with some Linux installed, then the fdisk-l shows the external drive as; sda, and my internal IDE PATA drive as; sdb. So when you want to mount some partitions, we need to run that fdisk-l to list just how each drive is perceived as. The older Linux and Slackware do use the old way as; IDE PATA is hda, and SCSI or SATA as sda, but the newer distros are useing sda and sdb, etc, and now with UUID method too. It sure would be less confusing if all Linux had the same identify method.

Did you have a question or did you just have an observation to share?

The general trend is to eventually drop the hdX designations (generally only used for pata devices) in favor of the sdX (originally just scsi type devices). The reason behind it is so that we can have fewer tools to maintain( just have sdparm rather than hdparm and sdparm, etc). The problem is that many of the chipset manufactures will not provide the necessary information about the chipsets to get the job done. So the distros that have gone all sdX (Fedora starting with F7?) still have a ton of outstanding bugs (like 40-60% transfer speed reduction in sata-pata transfers on some hardware, nforce4 chipsets among others). Once all those bugs have been cleared (and it will still be a while) I think virtually all distros will make the switch. It may be one of those things that becomes moot before it actually gets solved. My guess is that in the next couple of years pata devices will stop being produced.

I see then, and thanks for the helpful information. The main items I use this for are the grub boot menu.lst file, and to manually mount some partitions with the /etc/fstab file.