The Redhat linux reboot puts me into a maintenance shell because disks are discovered and name differently.

[Barry Brimer]

> The problem; I guess is that the system is discovering & naming the disks
> in different order everytime the server is rebooted.  For example the
> /dev/sda which represents the raid5 device created on local internal SAS
> disk is discovered as /dev/sdew ... and I guess this is the reason I am
> being dropped into the maintenance shell.  I tell this because after I
> login to the maintenance shell I see that the /dev/sda represents a 500G
> SAN disk instead of a 600G internal disk.  The internal disk is named
> /dev/sdew and  if I disconnect the fibre cables; the server boots just
> fine.
>
> Is there a way to make sure that the disks are named consistently across
> reboots?
> Please suggest or point me in the right direction.

Your /etc/fstab and /etc/grub.conf (really /boot/grub/grub.conf) should use
LABELs to identify filesystems, not devices.  RHEL 6 also allows you to specify
filesystems by UUID.  I don't know if that works in RHEL 5 or not.