Removing Labels from fstab

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Sat Sep 29 12:32:22 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 10:27 +0000, R. G. Newbury wrote: 
> Fedora 8rc2 like Fedora 6 and 7 uses labels in fstab.
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on what happens if I just replace the labels 
> with /dev/sdaXX references?

It'll work if you use the right ones, just the same as prior versions.
But some problems being:

If you're updating a system, and your old fstab used /dev/hda style
device names, you need to change things around during the update process
to the new system.

If you have removable drives, and you don't always boot up with the same
drives attached, some device names *may* change (i.e. /dev/sdc may refer
to another device, now).

All hard drives are now referred to as SCSI.  i.e. what was /dev/hda is
probably now /dev/sda, the prior gotcha notwithstanding (device names
changing).  Before, that would only have been an issue with people using
SCSI drives, IDE device names wouldn't have been changed around by other
things.  And you have to figure out which drive is which.  With labels,
you only had to do that the once, thereafter the label would always
refer to the same drive/partition, whereever it was attached.

But why do you want to do this?  The only real problem I encounter with
labels is when there's a duplicated label name added to a system.  There
really needs to be some way for the user to step in an intervene before
a device gets mounted, in that circumstance, so you can keep the one you
need, and tweak the additional one.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.5-76.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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