Comment 6 for bug 569645

Ridgeland,
Thanks for taking some time answering this.
In fact, as far as I remember, the stock grub.cfg uses UUID as well, so the system boots, whatever the order of the drives.
Using UUID everywhere would not matter, except when I need to pass option via the kernel boot options to the libata to properly handle the two disk controller available on my system.
libata.force option can take a device id as argument, which is the number of the ata channel. Obviously, this number changes depending on the order the controllers are initialized. As a consequence, the option for controller A can be passed to controller B and vice-versa, which is not good.

I don't know if I can add some script in grub which would get the "which is which" device, and set the appropriate option in the kernel boot line, or if I can pass options to the libata after boot, via init for instance.

The other issue, which may deserve a separate bug report, is that the installer from the live CD assumes that sda is the boot disk, the MBR of which to put grub on. This is not always the case, because of this random name assignement to the disks we are discussing here. When performing the install, while modifying the partition table, I noticed that sda was not the disk the computer normally boots on. But I had no chance to tell the installer that grub should be installed in the MBR of sdb, not sda. Also, if the disk were not partitionned differently, I would have no chance to notice this reversal of device names.

I did not have such an issue with karmic.