or even better Harddisks by Label
in debian Lenny both grub and fstab still use /dev/sda like descriptions for harddrives. this might cause problems as soon as you have more than one harddrive controller in your system (or maybe even with just one controller but several drives?). however, due to some magic voodoo your system might detect your primary boot harddisk as /dev/sda the first time and /dev/sdd the second time you boot your system.. this causes it of course to not mount your root directory and therefore to crash while booting.
the simple way out of this situation is to assign UUID's to the partitions and refer to all partitions by UUID in both grub's menu.lst and in fstab.
so first boot your os and hope it will do so :) if it doesn't keep trying until it eventually does boot :)
check out your /etc/fstab where you can see all partitions that are relevant to the system right now. for all partitions you see a /dev/sda1 or similar name you must now find out the uuid
you can do this by using the tool blkid like this:
# blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: UUID="a2d94c04-06c3-4d92-9e04-dd9e704c0d31" TYPE="ext3
this shows you the UUID of /dev/sda1
now in your fstab replace a line that looks like this:
/dev/sda1 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
with this:
UUID=a2d94c04-06c3-4d92-9e04-dd9e704c0d31 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
repeat this for all your partitions.
in some distributions, like Debian Lenny, you won't get a UUID for your swap partition. if this is the case disable swap
swapoff -a
then re-create the swap partiton (let's say that was /dev/sda5)
mkswap /dev/sda5
this command should already return the UUID .. if it does not you can try to find it with blkid as described above. if still unlucky you could try to lable the partition (when swap is still disabled). i've read that this might also assing a UUID to the partition.
don't forget to also update your /boot/grub/menu.lst file scroll down to your boot menu entries and edit the line where it says something like:
title My Linux root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-25-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic
with something more like this:
title My Linux uuid a2d94c04-06c3-4d92-9e04-dd9e704c0d31 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-25-generic root=UUID=a2d94c04-06c3-4d92-9e04-dd9e704c0d31 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic
it might not be necessary to replace “root (hd0,0)” with that uuid line when you only enable one of your controllers in the bios as possible boot devices, but once you're editing that file, do it completely :)
now reboot your system and hope i didn't fool you :)