Auto mounting of “identical” external USB drives in Ubuntu swaps the mount points

Question

I have 2 identical Western Digial Elements 1,5 TB external harddrives, but they are causing some problems when they mount. The problem is that the OS sees them as identical drives with the same identifier. I'll give an example.

HDD 1:
Location /dev/sdc

HDD 2:
Location /dev/sdd

So i edited /etc/fstab and mounted /dev/sdc to /mnt/drive1, and /dev/sdd to /mnt/drive2, and this works as expected. But once in a while after i reboot the OS i confused and HDD 2 is suddonly at /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdd. So the wrong HDD is mounted to the wrong place. This of course is causing problems since the files and folders that i expect to be at /mnt/drive1 actually are at `/mnt/drive2``

Is there a way for me to give the drives a different identifier so that this doesn't happen?

Answer 1

You can use UUIDs instead of the /dev/... device names.

Do this:

sudo blkid

to get a list of UUIDs and then replace the /dev/sdc bit of fstab with UUID=xxx-xxx-xxxx

See Ubuntu's UUID docs for details.