Re: [gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?

[Richard Freeman]

Florian Philipp wrote:
> BTW: UIDs and/or volume labels are the way to go if you want to avoid
> problems with changing device names.
>

This won't help you much with booting but for any other partitions you 
can always use /dev/disk/by-uuid/#### or one of the other directories 
under /dev/disk to help uniquely identify disks.  Another trick I've 
used that works really well is to use LVM (assuming you don't use the 
removable drive with other operating systems).  LVM can figure out which 
device is which by label - ditto for software raid.

For booting I think your only option would be some kind of initrd as 
already suggested, or the equivalent in linuxBIOS if you're really 
daring - unless you can predict how drives get identified on each boot. 
  You might be able to do something tricky like putting a small mirrored 
boot partition on each drive so that it doesn't matter which one boots 
(I already do that with two drives just for redundancy, but I guess if 
you're clever you might be able to extend this).  I'm not sure how far 
you'd get with that with more than two drives - I don't think mda 
supports more than 2-drive mirrors, and grub can't handle anything other 
than simple mirroring).
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