Drive assignments changing

Question

I have an Ubuntu 14.04 Server machine set up with 3 drives: Two 2TB HDDs, and a 4GB USB drive for system. It seems that every time I boot the system it changes what drives are assigned to /dev/sd(a/b/c) I need to be able to mount these drives permanently and I can't do that if they're constantly shifting assignments.

Is this a problem with the way I'm mounting them, the BIOS or the system software?

Answer 1

I've never been able to determine a rhyme or reason to this phenonma, but this is why they started using UUIDs in fstab, instead of device names like /dev/sda1.

you can find the UUIDs of your disks with the command:

sudo ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid

Then in your /etc/fstab, change any lines starting with /dev/sdXX to start with A UUID= parameter like:

UUID=02b413b2-f6df-490d-b719-8c891d414f72 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1

This way, your disks will always mount correctly, despite any changes in device name assignments.