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I've finally taken the plunge and ditched Vista for Ubuntu 10.04, and have a strange problem when booting up.

Normally, my boot disk is /dev/sda, and grub boots from /dev/sda1 just fine. Once Linux has started, if I plug in my USB disk it is automatically mounted as /dev/sdb, and again, everything is peachy.

The weirdness happens if I try to boot with the USB disk plugged in. For some reason, the USB disk is detected as /dev/sda, and my internal disk is detected as /dev/sdb. Grub then fails to start, giving error code 17, because there's no boot partition on /dev/sda.

Is there any way I can control how these disks are detected whn the system starts up? If it helps, the laptop is a Sony Vaio VGN-AR51E

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Check your BIOS settings. There may be a way to control how devices are detected. Also check your boot device order and similar, if you have such settings available.

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