Can't tell which hard drive to install Fedora 13 OS to.

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:55 AM,  <allen at math.binghamton.edu> wrote:
> PartitionMagic doesn't run on Windows Vista which is what I have.  Also,
> space isn't an issue on the Data drive since it is completely clear (all
> 150 GB of it), so one drive has Windows installed on it with all of my
> personal data, and the other drive has literally nothing on it (which is
> the drive I wish to install F13 on).  So when I go to install F13 to a
> hard drive, I have to choose one of the two drives, and their only
> distinguishing characteristics are their serial numbers and whether they
> are "sda" or "sdb" which I assume stands for "slave drive a" and "slave
> drive b", and I would think that Windows is installed on sda, but
> assumptions are dangerous in the computer world.

I don't remember the keywords to search for on that, but, yeah, it's a
dangerous assumption.

Most modern BIOSes have this bad habit of playing with the drive
assignments when something happens. (I power my workstation down at
night and unplug it, and it seems that just unplugging it triggers an
assignment swap.)

Finding the UUID is the best way to determine which drive is which.
And, having said that, I don't remember whether gparted will tell you
the UUIDs.

man blkid

will tell you how to get a list of the UUIDs for the volumes on your
system, which may be of use.

--
Joel Rees