I'm very much a Linux newbie, trying to move away from Win2k.

I have setup Debian on my computer using Knoppix 3.2 and the hd-install script. Overall things worked out
quite well, but I still have a few problems. Here is the one topping my list.

I have two external firewire disk enclosures, one with a vfat disk, the other one with a ntfs drive and a cd
burner. I got all of this to work by editing /etc/modules to load what was needed, using the rescan-scsi-bus shell to map the devices to /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 (I didn't worry about the burner yet, just focusing on the hard disks for now)
I am able to mount the devices ... but I am trying to automate it (at login, system boot, whatever)
OK, so heres the problem.
I have no way to predict which of the hdds is getting picked up as /dev/sda1 and which one gets /dev/sdb1.
It seems to be random, or decided by the order I switched the devices on. This makes mounting the devices or creating a /etc/fstab entry difficult. What I am aiming for is to get the devices mounted in a predictable way. In Win2k I think the os uses some sort of intelligence to make sure firewire disks always end up mapped as the drive letter assigned to them...
Can you suggest a way to get similar behavior out of linux?
Thanks

The solution to this problem is to use the scsidev utility.
There is a debian package called "scsitools" and it includes both rescan-scsi-bus.sh (to detect added devices) and scsidev (to build device names with predictable names using the /etc/scsi.alias file).