My computer has a single IDE hard drive installed. I just noticed that if I run fdisk -l on the ubuntu trrminal, it displays:

sda1 FAT32 (Windows Recovery)
sda2 NTFS (Win XP)
sda3 Linux (Ubuntu)
sda4 Extended
sda5 Linux Swap (Swap)

However when I look at the menu.lst file in grub, it points to hd0,2: hd0,3: and so forth.

Also if I boot up Puppy, and run fdisk -l, it also lists:

/dev/hda1
/dev/hda2
/dev/hda3
/dev/hda4
/dev/hda5

I understand that sda should refer to a SATA drive and that GRUB numbers drives differently than operating systems.

My question is, why does Ubuntu see my drive differently and does it matter?

No, it appears fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Those are all ways of saying almost the same thing differently.

On second thought, are your drives sata ot eide:

There was a thread in the Ubuntu forums about the id of ide drives being called sd. I don't recall if there was any impact on the system. But if your really concerned, I would check there. However, as far as partition tables go, if they were wrongly identified, they probably wouldn't work, or work very badly.

On my systems, in the /dev folder, my drives are identified as sda1, sda2, etc. In Grub, they are identified as hda1, hda2, etc. I wouldn't worry about it. As Joedude said, if it aint's broke....

Thanks guys. I figured it didn't make much difference since the system is running good, but figured I'd ask the experts. I've just been playing around with making new partitions and modifying my GRUB files (in other words learning by experimenting), and noticed the difference.

Just adding my voice to the choir here but my drives are identified as /dev/sd** in Linux proper and hd** in GRUB as well. Even external USB drives.