Hi,

So I installed a new disk into my machine which happens to be an IDE drive. It shows up as /dev/sda pushing my SATA drives back to /dev/sdb and therefore I am unable to boot my system until I take out the offending IDE drive.

I have tried all of the jumpers on the IDE disk and different cable positions... nothing, it still shows up as /dev/sda. Changing the order in my BIOS does nothing either (as should be expected...).

I only have one IDE connector on the mobo so ... it's always on the primary channel.

Is there anyway to force it to become /dev/sdb/c/d etc anything other than /dev/sda? So that I can boot my encrypted disks properly?

Thanks.

(P.S I know a USB enclosure would do the trick but I don't want to do that)

yes this is a problem with mixing them easy fix go into bios setup and set your priority disk to the manufactures harddrive you want to use and in there put your harddrives in the order you want. this will put it back the way it was.
yes but did you chose the correct harddrive to boot from. I have them mixed and put them in order but I have to choose the one I want to boot from also.

If you can't fix this in the BIOS, an IDE to SATA converter is a cheap fix.

It still ignores the bios settings. Is it possible to simply change my /dev/crypttab device names? Or do I need to do more than that?

Slackware does boot - that's not a problem (the bios setting handles that perfectly).

Do I have to update my initrd and point it to the new /dev? ... Oh god, I hope not, I hate building initrd's.

In your fstab, crypttab, and mkinit command line, you can specify the disk by UUID of the partition instead of /dev/sdXX.

(I find the UUID's with the blkid command. Use yours instead of blah-blah-blah.)
In fstab, replace the /dev/blah with UUID=blah-blah-blah

In the mkinit command line, replace the "-C /dev/blah" part with "-C /dev/disk/by-uuid/blah-blah-blah"

In crypttab, you can replace the /dev/blah with /dev/disk/by-uuid/blah-blah-blah too.
(Interestingly, "cryptsetup luksOpen" command will also recognize the device parameter as UUID=blah-blah-blah, but "cryptsetup isLuks" does not, so rc.0 does not open the device.)

Additionally, if your slackware boots and loads the existing initrd + kernel, you shouldn't have to adjust your initrd.
If it's just that your encrypted /home (or whatever you mount it as) isn't loading, then yes you can simply change your crypttab.