disklabel

[Uday Kumar Reddy]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 23:25:34 +0000, Timothy Murphy
<tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> On Thursday 16 December 2004 17:50, Uday Kumar Reddy wrote:
> 
> > In fact, having disk labels is immensely helpful when adding/deleting
> > partitions changes the partition minor numbers. With disk labels being
> > used in fstab and grub.conf, you don't have to manually edit all the
> > device names that have got incremented/decremented.
> 
> Surely if you add partitions you will have to edit fstab anyway.
> I would actually think disk-labels would be more likely to cause confusion.
> Can you give an example where disk-lables would help
> when adding a partition?

When you have a disk label for a given partition, you don't have to
worry about updating that particular entry (line) in fstab
irrespective of how many partitions you have added or deleted before
that particular partition on the disk. Now, if you have labels for all
your partitions, /, /home, etc... you can just forget about these
entries in fstab. Obviously, you have to add/delete an entry when you
add/delete a partition, but you don't have to bother about the other
entries; do you ever have to edit anything else (except the swap
partition entry may be or when you have FAT/NTFS partitions)?

Though labels may cause trouble and confusion when you add another
hard-disk, which of these happens  more frequently --- adding a
hard-disk (temporarily/permanently) OR partition numbers getting
changed due to adding/deleting a partition? Also, the trouble caused
in the latter case is much more sometimes because partition table
entries not being in the disk order is very easy to overlook.

-- Uday

> 
> I think disk-labels are moderately (not immensely, don't exaggerate) helpful
> to a small proportion of Linux users.
> But they are confusing and annoying to a far larger number.
> 
> --
> Timothy Murphy
> e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
> tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
> 
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