Udev fixes this for most filesystems - except / which is cruical.I just pulled the "pata-drivers" branch of libata-dev.git into the "upstream" branch, which means that Alan's libata PATA driver collection is now queued for 2.6.19.Too friggin' hard to test Alan's stuff for older IDE here, therefore ignored so far :( I have some old hardware that Alan is addressing, even an old IBM 260MB PCMCIA HDD.
Testing-wise, these PATA drivers have been Andrew Morton's -mm tree for many months. Community-wise, no one posted objections to the PATA driver merge plan, when Alan posted it on LKML and linux-ide.
I can't see an easy way to arrange multi-boot with different /etc/fstab depending if I'm trying /dev/hdaX or /dev/sdaX. Parallel '/' partitions?
Got udev?
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3802110A_5LR13RN7-partX could be your friend.