I started with one sata drive with my root partition on it:

/dev/sda1 boot
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 root

and I've just added TWO new sata drives via a pci sata controller (mobo doesn't have 2 more sata ports so I used a sata controller with 2 sata ports)

now the system fails to boot saying /dev/sda3 is not a valid root partition. I've already figured out that linux has decided to make one of the two new sata drives /dev/sda instead of doing something NOT retarded like making the NEW sata drives /dev/sdB and /dev/sdC.

In grub I edit the root=/dev/sda3 to root=/dev/sdc3 and it gets past the part it stopped at earlier and gets further along with booting.

However NOW it stops saying fsck.ext3 cannot clean /dev/sda3.... obviously another incorrect reference to the now invalid root partition name.

How can I fix this annoying issue?

I had a vaughly similar problem like this: Existing hard drive in hole 1 on mother board, existing DVD drive in hole 2.

Plug in a new hd into hole 3.

Grub thinks it's sdb, i.e. the second hd, as I wished, but Debian thinks it's sda.

All that was needed was to plug the new hd into 2 and put the DVD drive into 3.

Don't know if this might help? Aren't you being a bit ambitious putting them both in? Perhaps get one working and then put the second in??

You probably need to adjust your /boot/grub.conf file and your /etc/fstab file to match the current state of things.

Thanks. Actually I ended up fixing it after complaining on the forums about it by changing /etc/fstab to use /dev/sdc3 as root and then I updated my grub conf later.

It's just annoying that new hardware can hijack existing hardware devices which will _always_ cause problems and need configs updated.

Anyway thanks for the replies!

Thanks for letting us now. Also, please consider marking the thread as solved. The option is available in the "thread tools" menu I think.