[ltp] Reserving disk drive identities?

[Richard Neill]

Dear All,

I wonder if anyone can help me here. I have 2 removable drives connected 
to my Thinkpad, one is a Firewire HDD, and the other is a compact flash 
card (an IBM microdrive) connected via a usb card reader. They all work 
OK, but...

Depending on which is plugged in, the order in which they are plugged 
in, and the situation at power on, they both fight over which is 
/dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb. They also mess up the scsi id of the CD 
writer (was 0,0,0, sometimes becomes 1,0,0). This makes mounting them a 
real nuisance - as I can't put the right entry in /etc/fstab.

Is there any way to "reserve a drive letter" like one can in Windows, 
such that I always predictably get the same physical device assigned to 
the same /dev/sdX ?
Eg, I might have:
Firewire HDD not plugged in; USB drive plugged in.
	=> /dev/sda reserved, /dev/sdb assigned to USB drive

I'm using Mandrake 9.1, which uses devfs. If anyone can help, or give me 
a pointer to the right howto, I'd be very grateful!

Thanks a lot

Richard





[P.S. The Samsung S300 phone works "out of the box" with the included 
serial cable - it's a proper serial modem :-) ]