Problem I'm able to understand:
Suppose I have
$NUMDISKS that can be 1 or 2 ... or n
and
$DISKS that can be
sda, or
sda sdb
or sda sdb sdc
(so a string with the didks separated by space)
I want to assign

DRIVE1=sda
DRIVE2=sdb
...
DRIVEN=sdn

if I script

for i in $(seq 1 $NUMDISKS)
do
      DRIVE${i}="$(echo $DISKS | cut -d ' ' -f ${i})"
done

I get this error through assignment:

DRIVE1=sda: command not found

Instead if the disk env variable is cciss/c0d0 I get
DRIVE1=cciss/c0d0: No such file or directory

Any glue to the cause??? And to succeed to do the dynamic assignment?

Thanks,
Gianluca