I have a bootable linux thumb drive meant to deploy linux OS images and I've been having problems with the thumb drive occasionally changing the /dev/sd device it mounts as, wreaking havoc with the install scripts. Is it possible to force the linux system on the thumb drive to always detect the thumb drive as a specific sd device? My thumb drive usually mounts as sda, although a thumb drive image I was using as a reference always comes up as sdb.
I did some research and it looks like I might be able to do something with grub or udev, but I wasn't able to find specific enough information to get what I wanted. Another interesting thing I saw with udev is that you don't necessarily have to use /dev/sd devices, one website had an example with /dev/thumb. It would be ideal to have the thumb drive be detected as something like that so that all sd devices are actual devices in the host machine.
The thumb drive has a normal (i.e. not modified live cd, an actual install targeted at the drive) install of CentOS 5.8.
So my question is: is it possible to force linux to always detect a specific hardware device on a specific block device?
Thanks in advance for your responses.