Installation changing the Partition Label

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 07:17:05AM -0400, John M Cavallo wrote:
> 
> I believe anaconda did write a label of '/' when one already existed. I will 
> try to confirm this this evening.

If that is really the case that would be a nasty bug; especially
that anaconda was avoiding doing that for quite a while.

OTOH it is been often very annoying that anaconda does not have an
option which would allow you to specify your own labels.  This is
not a show-stopper though but it could be a serious PITA at times.

> On the other point, it should recycle the labels on partitions
> that are only reformatted not resized, since other installations
> on that disk will rely on those. Why should it rewrite the
> partition table when the partition aren't changed?

Labels are not on partitions but on file systems so not resizing
is not relevant but reformatting is.  If anaconda wrote labels
which collide with ones which already exist that would be really
the same bug as the above.  A way to recover would be to boot
"rescue", without mounting any file systems, and to fix offending
labels from there.

If you are indeed seeing such problem, and an idea is to skip label
checking in anaconda, then appending some random, long enough,
string to "usual" labels would make in practice such label
collisions highly unlikely.

   Michal