confusing /etc/fstab
Paul F. Almquist
paul at almquist.name
Mon Jan 31 21:32:42 UTC 2005
On Monday 31 January 2005 13:33, Pedro Fernandes Macedo wrote:
> Paul F. Almquist wrote:
> >Labeling does introduce a problem: What happens if 2 partitions have the
> > same label? Which one does mount choose? I do not know the algorithm
> > but I do know that mount does not know which one you want to use. In the
> > technical college where I taught Unix/Linux system administration we had
> > removable IDE drives in our lab machines. (standard IDE drives in a tray
> > that slides into a bay the in cabinet. works good. I use them at home
> > too) I had a removable drive bay on my office machine. A couple of times
> > I had to make some repairs to corrupted student drives. Since the drives
> > are not hot-swappable I would power down my machine, insert the
> > student's drive, power up and boot. Their partition labels were the same
> > as on my internal IDE drive and as a result would bet mounted instead of
> > my partitions. After a couple time of messing with that I changed the
> > /etc/fstab file on my system to use device names instead of labels.
> >
> >fsck also recognizes the labels, probably other disk related commands
> > too.
> >
> >paul
>
> In such cases , I strongly suggest changing the labels. Here I used to
> have FC2 and FC3 test releases (during FC3 test) installed.
> The root for FC2 was labeled / , the one for FC3 was labeled fc3/ . And
> the same way for other partitions.
> Now , if you need to insert another disk with the same labels , you can
> always change the root=LABEL=/ part on grub to point to the right device.
> This change can be done at boot time (just press "a" on grub screen) and
> it probably will fix the issue, since the kernel will know exactly which
> partition to use on boot time.
That would take care of getting the right root partition but what about the
case where, for example, /usr was in a separate partition on each disk with
the same labels?
Fortunately I rarely had to deal with the problem and since I retired last May
I won't likely run into to it again.
paul
--
Paul F. Almquist
paul at almquist.name
Eau Claire, WI USA
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