I have two sata drives and one usb drive. After booting, /dev/sdb is sometimes the second sata drive and other times the usb drive. I understand that there are work-arounds for a number of problems this causes; some of these are the use of udev rules or LABELs or UUIDs to identify partitions, but I still would rather have a consistent name for my second sata drive. (My drives all have multiple partitions, and it's hard for me to keep them straight without consistent nomenclature.) Is there any way to prevent the kernel from recognizing any usb drive at boot time, with a way to recognize it later after boot?

I've noticed that the order seems to be dependent on the time between the first display of the grub.cfg menu and the time when an entry is selected. Is there any way to build a delay into the boot process, either through grub commands or through kernel boot parameters?

You can use labels in fstab, or UUID's. Use blkid, it will show you PARTUUID's and UUID's. Labeling is probably the nicest way, you can label your filesystems 'storage', 'data', 'system', whatnot.

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https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID
bah, profile shows fedora symbol. Details?

Are the two internal disks really SATA, or do you have an old (E)IDE drive in there that gets represented as /dev/sd# ?. Various distros handle this mix poorly.

nope.

The ordering is determined by how long it takes drives to respond to a controller query...

The only relatively guaranteed disk is /dev/sda, which is used by the BIOS/UFI to load the boot program; and that is only because it must be spun up and ready when the boot program takes over. After that all bets are off.

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