Get to the partition edit and custom create. The hdd I want to install to shows as /dev/sdc.
This pc has a booting IDE hdd plus 2 scsi hdds for data copies and swap. Needless to say (!) the scsis have luns 5,6 (non-booting) and the bios knows what boots first.
It makes no difference if I change the disk order in the Grub setup so that (hd0) is the IDE, the subsequent install will end up under /dev and in /var/lib/hardware—devices with the scsis seen as /dev/sda /dev/sdb and IDE as /dev/sdc.
For fun I took off the scsis and of course there’s only 1 hdd /dev/sda. Install completes ok. Turn off, plug up scsis, boot up and - chaos.
Dare I mention that my 2 linux rescue cds, another distro sometimes used as a live/rescue and a couple more full install distros manage to know that /dev/sda is the IDE, or even more correctly /dev/hda?
I’m aware of the UUID scheme wrt entries in fstab and the IDE and its various partitions have their UUID numbers show up in the entries in that final /devices directory under /var/lib/hardware.
The thing is the UUIDs remain the same whether a hdd is sda, sdb or sdc.
What mechanism is deciding the naming and could I force the pairing of UUID and sdx somehow if I did an install with IDE alone , maybe using a udev rule, so that when the scsis are plugged up they show as sdb, sdc?
Or is this an opensuse mangling of the detection mechanism related to the replacement of hdx by sdx?
Dare I jump in here and try to help? Let me say that hard drive assignments are based on the BIOS hardware order they are found using the mythology built-in to openSUSE. However the real question to you is what does it matter if a drive is called sda or sdb or sdc? Now as you determined adding in additional drives will change these assignments, but by using the UID, it does not really matter. After the system installation, only UID’s are used except when you startup up the partitioner.
As for grub, it uses the HDx assignments based on two things only. Number one is the boot drive is ALWAYS HD0 and second all other drive assignments use the device.map file for mapping sdx to HDx. So if you decide to boot from a drive that is not sda for instance through a BIOS selection, you must make sure the sdx = HD0 in the device.map and seen that way in your grub menu.lst file.
In general, trying to fight the sdx assignments is like swimming upstream and does not make anything better really. Give in and connect the drives as you like, see what they get assigned, make sure the boot drive is HD0 in device.map and menu.lst and the rest will default to using UID’s. (UID’s can also be used in the device.map file in place of sdx if you like.)
trying to fight the sdx assignments is like swimming upstream and does not make anything better really.
For the first part of sentence, that’s because the adoption of sdeverything changed the flow direction. The second part, how appropriate as well as applying to so much of almost any distro major number version compared to previous.