Hi CentOS 5.4(final) 2.6.18-164el5PAE. I am trying to prevent removable USB and eSATA devices from occupying /dev/sdX devices ahead of a 3ware RAID controller. For example: at boot, if a USB drive and eSATA HDD (connected to an LSI 1068E onboard controller, reflashed in "IT" mode to handle hotplug devices) were both present, they would occupy devices /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, ahead of the RAID controller which ends up as /dev/sdd. As these are removable devices, they should normally get handled by custom udev script looking for adds matching KERNEL=="sd[c-z][0-9]" ,SUBSYSTEM=="block", so the volume handled by RAID controller gets grabbed by udev but fails to mount and subsequent udev plug events fails due the slots left empty below /dev/sdd. If no hotplug devices are present while booting, fstab handles mounting of the system and RAID volume: SATA system HDD /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / RAID array LABEL=STORE /store ## mounts == /dev/sdb1 I realise this description is kind of a tangle, but i am essentially looking for a way to hard-map the 3ware RAID controller to /dev/sdb (UUID won't work as there are multiples of this system) before PCI (?) enumeration picks up the USB and LSI-managed devices so that udev can take care of the device at /dev/sdc and above. I've tried blacklisting the mpt and usb-storage modules and short-circuiting SUBSYSTEM=="block" devices in 05-udev-early.rules, all with zero or negative effect. rc.sysinit doesn't appear to be the right place and that's about as deep down as i know how to go. cheers, cs