[clue] HDD "shell game" issue

[foo7775 at comcast.net]

Hi All, 

I've run into a situation that has me puzzled (& a little bit humbled, actually). I have a server that started out with five drives, sda - sde (no RAID, no LVM). The sde drive has been throwing alerts for a few days, so I went in to the DC to replace it. The drives are hot-swappable, so I didn't expect much problem - but when I inserted the new drive, the server appeared to not detect it - and started to generate alerts for the sdB drive as well. (I'm sure that at least a couple of you can probably see where this is going...) 

After puzzling over the problem for a little while, I found that the new drive had (appropriated|been assigned to) the sdB slot, rather than sdE like I had expected. At that point, I started trying to collect info so that I could recreate the fstab file using 'mount-by-uuid' - but regardless of what configuration I try, I can't seem to get the original sdB drive to reappear: 

If I boot with the drive slot open, I get sda, sdc & sdd. 

If I boot with the drive slot holding the bad/original drive, the server shows sda through sdd. 

If I boot with the drive slot holding the new/unformatted drive, the boot process fails when it's unable to complete checking the drives (server's been up for >450 days), & I had to boot from a rescue drive & comment out the sdb entry in fstab to get the server to complete booting. 

The worst part of dealing with this is that I *know* that it's not a really complex issue - but I am just not seeing how to restore the server to proper function (which has me feeling distinctly inept). I'm sure that there's data that I've forgotten to provide here, so if anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. 

I would really appreciate any thoughts/suggestions that anyone can provide. 

Thanks in advance. 
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