USB boot, detect correct / partition

I installed arch to my external hard drive which works fine.
The grub config point points root at /dev/sda1 and this is also in fstab to tell it to mount /dev/sda1 to /.
The problem is that when my pen drive is installed the external harddrive becomes sdb and i have to edit both these file to get a proper boot.
The same problem occurs when a pc has a sata hd - these are referred to as sda, sdb rather than hda, hdb.
How can i compensate for this so i dont have to edit grub & fstab everytime?
Ckearly distros than run off pendrives or even live cds can deal with these issues, does anyone have an idea how?

Depending on the size of the drive (whether it's a hard drive of flash drive), OS X doesn't always create an exFAT drive Windows can correctly read. Format the drive on a Windows computer. OS X will be able read/write the exFAT flash drive whether it's MBR or not.

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    padavoine wrote:
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