Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

[Guest]

That title might not have made much sense, but here's the situation:

I have an external Seagate 750G HDD that I keep plugged in pretty much all the time. However, I also have quite a few USB flashdrives, and whenever I reboot the computer with the Seagate and one or more flashdrives the Seagate seems to get a more-or-less random /dev/sd*1 So, sometimes it gets mounted fro fstab, and most the time I have to find and mount it manually.
Is there any way to make the Seagate always get assigned like /dev/sdd1?

[Qqmike]

Re: Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

Good question.

That's a reason for the use of UUIds--
you'll note that the UUID for that drive is always the same ...

[Snowhog]

Re: Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

Yes. Identify it by it's UUID, which is (generally) a unique identifier assigned to each drive device.

With it connected, open a console and type:

sudo blkid

Identify the drives you are concerned about. Then, in your /etc/fstab file, if the device is already listed, change it's /dev/* identity to UUID= instead.

[Guest]

Re: Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

OIC!

Thank you very much. I had noticed the entries in the /etc/fstab weren't what I was used to seeing, but I hadn't gotten up to speed on UUIDs yet. Thank you both for letting me know. I think I've fixed the problem. I guess when I reboot I'll find out.

Thanks again.

[Qqmike]

Re: Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

But ...
that will not make a specific sdx stick to a specific drive ...

[cantab]

Re: Way to force a drive to use the same /dev?

It's possible to make specific sdx for specific hardware, but tricky - relates to 'udev rules' but I don't know much more.

However, if you're after device nodes, there exist /dev/disk/by-uuid/ and /dev/disk/by-id/ directories (the latter gives some more human friendly names like ata-Hitachi_HDP725050GLAT80_GE1530RE1ETNJE-part1