Lennart, try giving this patch a whirl. In the case after we scan the 
aliases list and we haven't found any block devices it will now try to 
scan the entire tree. It kinda worked under OpenBios although I ran into 
another bug where it can't open a device path that it gave me for the 
pci ide controller. It found the other 2 drives fine.

I think this maintains the correct balance of using short pretty names 
if available but working if they are not available.

There is a case where it will mess up however. If you only specify an 
alias for one device but need another device to build a raid or lvm it 
will fail. Although, thinking about it, this already would happen.

As always, you can specify the either path manually.

Doug