Mounting drives by label

[John Reiser]

> I've labelled my drives using e2label and they're now being recognised as 
> home_drive, audio_drive and devel_drive. I can only sometimes mount them 
> using fstab as it looks like the labels aren't being used, but the last /dev/
> sd* is (for example, /dev/sde1 might be audio_drive, but then on the next 
> boot, /dev/sdf1 is audio_drive but then the system fails on booting with the 
> error that /dev/sde1 is mounted).
> 
> There is nothing in /etc/mtab, but the problem seems to occur when the system 
> is rebooted after the shutdown procedure didn't work correctly.
> 
> Any ideas on this or what I should file it under with BZ?

If /etc/fstab contains lines such as
   /dev/sdf1    /dir1       ext3    defaults        2 2
then you are at the mercy of the random order in which the system recognizes
drives (sde, sdf, etc.)   It is somewhat curious, but not necessarily a bug,
if the order changes upon reboot after a failed shutdown (and no hardware changes.)

If /etc/fstab contains lines such as
   LABEL=audio_drive   /dir1   ext3    defaults     2 2
then the first partition with label "audio_drive" should be mounted as /dir1.
It is up to you to keep the labels unique.  Duplicate labels commonly occur
after moving drives from system to system, because neither people nor anaconda
reliably choose unique names ("/", "/1", "/home", "/boot", etc.)

If /etc/fstab contains lines such as
   UUID=xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx   /dir1   ext3  defaults    2 2
then the first partition with the specified UUID should be mounted as /dir1.
There is only a *very* small probability of collision in UUID, as long as
you don't copy partitions with a "blind" copy command such as 'cp' or 'dd'.
"tune2fs -l /dev/sdf1" shows the UUID of the ext3 filesystem in the
partition /dev/sdf1.

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