Comment 2 for bug 223994

    The drives are actually being randomly reassigned at each reboot, that is there is no persistence as I was thinking above. An example is links I had on the desktop that got reassigned to different partitions each reboot.

    A discussion of why using UUIDs is a problem for those of us who change things around on the hard drives a lot:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=731401
I suppose I could use labels, or assign short memorable UUIDs to the partitions, though it seems much better to use designations that are more reflective of the actual hardware because then I know at a glance what hardware I am using and thus speed and size data that helps me monitor the system.

    Another bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/205324

    Problem is a race between udev and dmsetup and a way to solve it?
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UdevDeviceMapper
http://fredericiana.com/2006/03/15/writing-udev-rules-short-notes/
http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
So, the Ubuntu installer scripts ought to be writing these persistence rules. Without such rules you are randomly assigning hardware into the filesystem hierarchy at each reboot which clearly plays havoc with a lot of other things.