LABEL in grub.conf

Ed Wilts ewilts at ewilts.org
Mon Jan 3 19:15:26 UTC 2005


On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 01:44:54PM -0500, Bill Matthews wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 11:43:06 -0600, Ed Wilts <ewilts at ewilts.org> wrote:
> > This label is normally written to the partition so that you know exactly
> > which partition you're mounting.  It's possible that with SCSI drives
> > your drives will get renumbered if a drive fails in the middle of the
> > list.  You use the e2label command to see and changel the label.
> 
> That was my problem.  In order to prepare for a restore, I start with
> a blank disk, and format it to match my old drive.  But in doing that,
> I don't think volume labels ever got set. "e2label /dev/sda1" returns
> /boot but "e2label /dev/sdb"1 returns nothing. .

There are several steps involved.  You don't really "format" a new
drive.  You partition it and then create your file systems before you do
the restore.  When you create the file systems, you can set the label.
mkfs.ext3 has the -L parameter to set it or run e2label manually after
you create the file systems (perhaps just before you boot off the newly
recovered disk).

> So in order for grub.conf to boot the new drive, I have to assign
> partition labels, or change grub.conf to use physical device names?

One of the two, yes.  And I don't think you can have 2 file systems with
the same label so you'll have to watch that too. 

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program




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