Paul F. Almquist wrote:
Labeling does introduce a problem: What happens if 2 partitions have the same label? Which one does mount choose? I do not know the algorithm but I do know that mount does not know which one you want to use. In the technical college where I taught Unix/Linux system administration we had removable IDE drives in our lab machines. (standard IDE drives in a tray that slides into a bay the in cabinet. works good. I use them at home too) I had a removable drive bay on my office machine. A couple of times I had to make some repairs to corrupted student drives. Since the drives are not hot-swappable I would power down my machine, insert the student's drive, power up and boot. Their partition labels were the same as on my internal IDE drive and as a result would bet mounted instead of my partitions. After a couple time of messing with that I changed the /etc/fstab file on my system to use device names instead of labels.In such cases , I strongly suggest changing the labels. Here I used to have FC2 and FC3 test releases (during FC3 test) installed.
fsck also recognizes the labels, probably other disk related commands too.
paul
The root for FC2 was labeled / , the one for FC3 was labeled fc3/ . And the same way for other partitions.
Now , if you need to insert another disk with the same labels , you can always change the root=LABEL=/ part on grub to point to the right device.
This change can be done at boot time (just press "a" on grub screen) and it probably will fix the issue, since the kernel will know exactly which partition to use on boot time.
-- Pedro Macedo
