/dev/sd devices that don't exist

[innominate]

Greetings,

This may be the same question as the message referenced below, but I'm curious why I get these devices I call "phantoms" in /dev

For example, when I boot from a USB drive (/dev/sda) on a machine that has no other disks, there's a phantom sdb file in /dev.  If I plug in another USB drive, it gets mapped to sdb.  This seems peculiar to Tiny Core... or at least the other distros I use such as Mint don't have such files until/unless there is an actual corresponding device.

Any insight would be appreciated but if someone knows how to change the behavior so that only files with actual devices are present, that would be ideal.

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,11737.msg62284.html#msg62284

Thanks,
Dave

[Rich]

Hi innominate
If you want to know which devices (disk drives) are actually present you can either click on the  Mount  icon or
look inside your  /etc/fstab  file. Alternatively, if you execute the command  mountables  it will create the file
/tmp/mountables  with a list of valid drives.

[tinypoodle]

This may be the same question as the message referenced below, but I'm curious why I get these devices I call "phantoms" in /dev

For example, when I boot from a USB drive (/dev/sda) on a machine that has no other disks, there's a phantom sdb file in /dev.

Not "phantoms" at all, static device nodes have never been excluded from udev specifications.

Any insight would be appreciated but if someone knows how to change the behavior so that only files with actual devices are present, that would be ideal.

ideal why?