Hello,

I currently have 3 HHDs in my computer and the 2nd one is dying and will be
replaced. All of them are SATA drives. Only the first drive is a boot drive, the
other 2 are storage/backups.
They are 74GB, 500GB (dead one), 1024GB.

I don't recall the details but I remember that there was one time that I went
into Ranish menu and it messed the partitions of a new drive I added (maybe I
didn't use Ranish to create the partitions, I don't remember).


Anyway, I'm fearfull that:
1) if I remove the 2nd harddrive and enter the RPM menu it will see that I only
have 2 harddrives and will think that the 3rd harddrive is the 2nd one and will
try to "fix" its partition table, corrupting it instead.
(I was surprised to see that the device names changed in Linux when I unplugged
my 2nd harddrive, even when I was using the same SATA connector... it seems it's
the way SATA works)

2) when I replace the 2nd harddrive with a new one, how exactly will RPM see it?
Isn't there any risk of mixing drives/partition tables? Even if there are drives
which are the same model (as the one replaced or the existing ones).

How exactly is RPM information stored? Does each HDD only has information about
itself? Or can a HDD have the information (stored in the RPM partition) about
all the drives in the system?

I was thinking on removing RPM from all HDDs except the first one (so that no
automatic fixing happens in these drives). Does this only require removing the
boot loader and deleting the RPM partition. Maybe I only need to remove the boot
loader?


What I want to ensure is that when I remove *or* replace the 2nd HDD and enter
into RPM, it will not try to "fix" anything automatically.


Thank you very much for your help.