How to force USB boot to /dev/sda?

[Goi]

Hi,

I have a custom linux environment with a 2.6 kernel downloaded from kernel.org with a simple busybox shell as init. The system boots off a USB flash drive with root=/dev/sda with lilo, and it works perfectly when it's alone with no other SATA drives.

However, once I connect a SATA drive to the PC, from the bootup logs, it seems that the SATA drive is detected as sda, and the USB flash drive is detected as sdb, so I get a kernel panic with the following message

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)
Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.37 #37

This is despite setting the boot order to boot from USB drives before SATA drives.

If I try to append the root=/dev/sdb boot option in LILO, I get a different kernel panic:

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,16)
Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.37 #37

How do I get force the USB drive to be /dev/sda so that it boots up correctly?

 

[lxskllr]

Look into using UUID. It's the preferred method when addressing drives since it's unique to the drive. Dunno the specifics. I could search it out, but so could you :^D