partition labels

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Thu Jun 16 09:43:06 UTC 2005


Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> I've just had trouble with FC3 not seeming able to find the /
> partition and mount it rw - it's reporting 'Read only file system' and
> refusing to start. Happened after I installed Ubuntu - from what I can
> find it seems this is because I've messed up by not giving things
> different labels. Does that sound right?

It's conceivable. Another possibility is that the disk or filesystem has 
serious errors and the kernel is quickly marking it read-only so as 
avoid further corruption.

 > but on to FC4...
> 
> When I install FC4 shall I make sure each partition has a unique
> label? Like / could be Label=fc4-base or something?

If you're doing an upgrade, anaconda will probably leave the filesystem 
labels as they are. If you delete the existing partitions and create new 
ones, anaconda will not (I believe) create partition labels that are 
duplicates of existing partition labels. I don't think you get to 
specify what the partition labels are.

> So are those partition labels just like directory names and then we
> mount it as whatever? I haven't been giving them labels so they've
> been getting whatever diskdruid gives them - which I think is the same
> as what they are mounted as (the partition for '/home' has the label
> '/home')

Those are the default labels that anaconda uses. If you already have a 
partition labelled "/" then anaconda will use label "/1" for the root 
partition.

Partition labels work rather like volume labels on MS-DOS filesystems. 
They just help you to quickly identify a partition, and don't have much 
other use.

Paul.




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