System Recovery

[Michael ODonnell]

> names of my two sata hard drives had been interchanged.
> [...] I had apparently bumped one of the sata data cables
> enough to get a bad contact

Ah.  Yes, that can be a real joybuzzer since the SATA drives
are presented via the SCSI midlayer and thus use the /dev/sd*
naming scheme.  If your first drive fails enough that it no
longer responds then the next SATA (or SCSI, or USB, etc)
drive that's found gets a silent promotion to /dev/sda and
all references to /dev/sdb* are (if you're lucky) now useless
while all references to /dev/sda* now refer to the device that
was formerly /dev/sdb*.  >-/