Re: Harddrive sorting

On August 27, 2026 2:06:08 PM Stefan Monnier <[email protected]> wrote:

>> When ever I boot, the harddrives are not booted in the wanted order (a
>> timing  problem case), sio that the Debian drive is /dev/sdb and
>> Windows is /dev/sda,  but I want /dev/sda = Linux and /dev/sdb
>> = Windows.
>
> Any reason you need to care about `/dev/sdX` names?  In almost all cases
> you can avoid this problem by referring to your disks (and partitions)
> via `/dev/disk/<SOMETHING>`.  That's significantly more verbose, but if
> needed you can define shorter symlinks.
>
>> Whilst there si no problem with the mountpoints, as I ca use UUID in
>> /etc/ fstab, I would like to know, if it is possible, to force Debian,
>> to see the  drives in the order, they are hardwired.
>
> I think if you wanted to really change it "the right way" would be to
> tell the kernel in which order it should probe them, or to give to the
> kernel a kind of "pre-allocation" of those names.  IIRC there is such
> a mechanism (well, partially at least) for audio devices which
> I remember using to swap the order of audio devices between built-in and
> HDMI or something like that, but I can't remember reading anything like
> that disks.  AFAIK the `/dev/disk/by-FOO/BAR` solution is simple and
> works well enough in practice.

Pardon my use of AI
Interesting thoughts:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a90b2cc-5144-83e8-93dc-93a6d85e9c9d?ogimg=plain

>
> BTW, personally I stay away from UUIDs and use things like labels
> instead, but admittedly I don't know of any mechanism to name disks (as
> opposed to partitions).
>
>
> === Stefan