[ale] Okay, I have HAD it with these...

[david w. millians]

(Brian had a good suggestion about using UUIDs to tag fstab and grub.
may try that this weekend. other ideas welcome, please!)

no, not snakes. mother hubbard sata controllers.

I've got a machine. It has a native SATA controller, and an add-on sata
controller.
There are three 'drives':
1) what usually gets seen as sda1. it's a 80gb drive.
2) a 400gb mirrored drive, from the addon. sdb1.
3) a 2nd 400gb mirrored drive. sdc1.

Before, the machine would boot, find sda1 (#1) from grub, and
everything's good. That was debian 2.6.18.5
I updated (like all good people do) and put 2.6.18.6 on there. Reboot, I
get busybox. Fine, I do all the things to repair grub and plan on
rebooting later. I get the new ram- 12gb! wow!- and do, and busybox again.

Rrrrrr. But 2.6.18.5 still works. So I boot there, realize, hey, you
need a kernel that sees that new ram. Installed, rebooted into it, and...
busybox. So I reboot, and now 2.6.18.5 won't boot.

5 seconds of panic.

So I mount drive a- seen as /dev/sdc1 instead of /sda1 and try to change
menu.lst. Then I remember, hey, grub is fancy, and I can change the boot
strings on the fly. Wow, okay, I'll give up on lilo officially. I change
it to boot to /dev/sdc1. It boots!
Yay!
There are some errors because sdc and sda are sorta reversed, but it boots.

But now it shows me via mount that / is at dev/sda1, not /dev/sdc1; it
didn't find swap at /dev/sda5, etc.

dmesg shows sda and sdb are #2 and #3 and sdc is #1.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the solution here is to put grub on
everything; that's what I did at home to make the thing just work. I
went round and round for about 3 weeks trying to make a system with 5
drives, onboard and addincard, work. First I thought it was renaming
weird because I was installing with a flash drive; then it wouldn't work
with USB cdrom...

I haven't changed thing one in the bios or the card's bios, either.

Advice welcome, before I start fiddling with fstab.

Thanks,
David