confusing /etc/fstab

Robert Storey y2kbug at ms25.hinet.net
Mon Jan 31 13:29:37 UTC 2005


I'm very curious (and not entirely pleased) by how different /etc/fstab
is in Fedora when compared to almost any other Linux distro I've used.
For example, the following is a fairly complex /etc/fstab from an old
version of SuSE:

# Device	Mountpoint	FStype	Options		Dump	fsckorder#
/dev/hda1	none		swap	defaults	0	0
/dev/hda2	/		ext2	defaults	1	1
/dev/hda3	/boot		ext2	defaults	2	2
/dev/hda5	/home		ext2	defaults	2	2
/dev/hda6	/tmp		ext2	defaults	2	2
/dev/hda7	/usr		ext2	defaults	2	2
/dev/hda8	/var		ext2	defaults	2	2
/dev/hdc	/cdrom		cd9660	ro,noauto	0	0
/dev/hdd	/cdrom1		cd9660	ro,noauto	0	0


Now compare that to my current FC3 installation:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
LABEL=/1                /                       ext3    defaults       
1 1
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620 
0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults       
0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults       
0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults       
0 0
LABEL=SWAP-hda2         swap                    swap    defaults       
0 0
/dev/hdd                /media/cdrecorder       auto   
pamconsole,ro,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/hdc                /media/cdrecorder2      auto   
pamconsole,ro,exec,noauto,managed 0 0


What's confusing to me here is that, in Fedora, I can't figure out which
partition is mounted where. Is my / partition /dev/hda3, or /dev/hda5,
or ???   Ditto for swap, or any other partition. If I wanted to make
some change in the partition table (for example, adding a /home
partition) I have no idea how I could get /etc/fstab to recognize it.

I've tried making some sense out of fstab-sync, but so far it's pretty
opague. Where does Fedora store the partition information? Anybody know
some links that can explain this messy filesystem table?

Thanks in advance,
Robert




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