Device identification problem during boot

Since installing xubuntu last autumn, it sometimes happened to me that my machine required several restarts to boot up. I have identified the problem but being linux n00b I was unable to find some solution to it for some time.

The problem was following:
I have two harddiscs in my computer - one is old IDE disc and the other is new SATA II disc. The Linux system is installed on the new disc which is usually identified as /dev/sda (where /dev/sda5 is the root partition). The other disc is usually on /dev/sdb. What sometimes happened was that the devices where identified the other way round - IDE being /dev/sda and SATA being /dev/sdb. After that the computer of course did not boot and ended in some sort of fallback console (sorry, I forgot the mode's name).

Sadly, asking administrators at work did not help me (most probably because I was not able to describe the problem correctly - the only thing I found out was that the IDE disc should be /dev/hd something and not /dev/sd something - very helpful).

Before some time I found what I thought will lead to solution, but I was hesitant to change the fstab because I didn't want to break it any more than it was :) What I needed was to identify the mount points by partition label instead of device (see http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Partition/#labels).

Today, I finally got to fixing it (at least, it appears to be fixed now :)). The whole process involved:

• installing GParted which unfortunately did not help me with setting the partition labels and thus was not that useful (it provided me with nice overview of the partitions :))
• setting label to ext3 partitions using tune2fs (e.g. tune2fs -L pubsw /dev/hdb1 sets label pubsw to par
• setting labels to NTFS partitions using ntfslabel (part of ntfsprogs package)
• modifying fstab to use the labels (see http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Partition/#labels for example fstab)

To sum it up - if you have this problem with identifying devices during boot up, use labels to identify them in fstab. This seems like a good idea generally because as I understand it the device identification can change when switching hardware (imagine adding shiny new HDD to your computer and not being able to boot up as the result - ouch!)

In the end the changes where really not that hard and if I knew a little about Linux I could've fixed this long time ago. But I'm a little smarter now and maybe after some time I will know Linux as good as Windows. Most probably after Windows 7 comes out - because last version I had is Windows XP, I will know very little about both Windows and Linux.