adding hard drives

[argon99]

I have been installing sabayon on my home theater. When I do an install I unplug the extra drives so if the installer is brain dead it doesn't wipe out 8 terabytes of videos and music files.

So I now have sabayon where I want it and am attempting to reconnect the other hard drives. This is turning out to be a major PITA. Grub uses /dev/sda1 to locate the root drive. But when I add another drive sda is no longer sda and the boot fails. I have used this method of unpluging then pluging in the drives on many distros. The last being the newest beta from mandriva so it did work with 2.6.30 ( I think the newest beta from mandriva uses 2.6.30). But it's not working with sabayon.

Does anybody know how to fix this? I have five hard drives to install.

I know this is a kernel issue and started with the addition of udev. But there doesn't seem to be a good solution with the current version of linux.

[Fitzcarraldo]

You can use each drive's UUID instead. Use the blkid command to find each drive's UUID and then replace devices in /etc/fstab and in /boot/grub/grub.conf with the UUIDs. See the posts Re: KDE 4.2 Dolphin automount NTFS on boot and Re: mount exitsting removeable hdd for examples for /etc/fstab; see the post Re: No sound for AC97 soundcard for an example of using the UUID in grub.conf. For grub.conf the kernel needs to be built using genkernel with the --disklabel argument in order to use UUIDs (see root=UUID= and the SL Wiki article on rebuilding a kernel using genkernel), although it may already have been built that way for the LiveDVD (I'm not sure, but it certainly used to be, and you can try editing grub.conf to see; at worst you'd need to boot a LiveDVD in order to be able to edit grub.conf on the HDD if the real_root=UUID= doesn't work).