Yesterday I took down my machine for two reasons. One, I was running low on hard drive space (I store a lot of CD and DVD ISO images for the office). Two, my numpad stopped working. I have no idea why. I plugged in a different USB keyboard and its numpad didn’t work either.
Anyway, I took the machine down, added the drive into the third SATA hookup (I have two drives in there already, with a maximum of four), and started everything back up again.
I couldn’t log in after it started up. I almost panicked, but being the calm, cool, sysadmin that I am, I tailed some logfiles which led me to discover that despite the new drive being in the third SATA port, it got named /dev/sdb, and the drive that was /dev/sdb was now /dev/sdc. That also happened to be where my /home partition was mounted. So I fixed /etc/fstab, mounted /home, and voila!, I could log in again.
After a quick XFS format of the new /dev/sdb1 partition, I was in business. See how easy Linux is? And people say it’s not for everybody…