A curse on LABEL=
Richard Lynch
rich at mail.wvnet.edu
Sun Apr 11 13:47:14 UTC 2004
Timothy Murphy wrote:
>I honestly expected to be shown simple, likely to occur, scenarios
>where LABELs are helpful,
>but all the examples that have been suggested
>are ones I cannot imagine a non-guru like me ever encountering.
>
>
Lets say I have a single drive dual boot system. The 1st two primary
partitions are Windows. The rest of the partitions on the drive are for
Linux. The 1st primary (C:) is full. The second (D:) is barely used.
I buy a new drive and, using a partitioning tool (e.g. PartitionMagic),
I create a new primary on the second drive and copy all my stuff from
the 2nd partition on the 1st drive to it. I delete the 2nd partition on
the 1st drive and expand the 1st partition into the new free space.
Now, for Windows, my C: and D: drives are intact and C: is no longer
full. D: is on my new drive. However, for Linux, /dev/hda3 has become
/dev/hda2. With the LABEL= approach the system will still boot. With
hardcoded devices it wont.
It doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with other scenarios
that would be even more disruptive to the partition numbers. For
example, re-arranging primary and logical partitions because one needs
to adjust the space allocations or the system layout. Basically, the
LABEL= paradigm gives you a level of indirection for devices -- a
symbolic name instead of a hardcoded device address. This is generally
considered a good thing and a more flexible approach to system design
and administration.
--
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