I've just recently run into a problem where sometimes when a machine boots, the kernel can't find init. This appears to be because my grub configuration line says "root=/dev/sda5" and _sometimes_ the drive that contains my root partition is sdb instead of sda. AFAICT, for the past 30 years the linux kernel was 100% consistent in the order that hard drives were labelled -- but recently that has seems to have changed.
I use partition labels in my fstab, so that's not a problem, but after all these years, the kernel still doesn't know how to grok parition labels. Are we really expected now to set up an initrd just so that the kernel can find the root partition?? -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! I wonder if I could at ever get started in the gmail.com credit world?