On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 06:23 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote: > When I use "fdisk" to Print the drive hda and hdb and hdc... I want > my label to be what it tells me. > > ...[snip]... > > What can the LABEL software do to find the moved hard drive that I > can't? I really do not know how it can do that. Also now days all the > new drives are via USB. Answering them in one go. It's the computer, not you. When you label partitions in a certain way, you don't have to go hunting around to find them. You don't have to play with fdisk, you don't have to scratch your head to figure out what to put in fdisk. Here's how one of my drive (called max) layouts is set up: Current device Volume label Mount point location /dev/sda1 max/boot /boot /dev/sda2 max/home /home /dev/sda3 max/var /var /dev/sda5 max/usr /usr /dev/sda6 max/tmp /tmp /dev/sda7 max-swap swap /dev/sda8 max/ / Now, depending on what's plugged in where, this drive may be /dev/sda it may not. If I'd used device-based mounting points, and it was connected so it's no longer /dev/sda, I'd have to change fstab entries. But if I used labels, the computer sorts that out for me. My fstab files have no /dev type of entries. If I want to manually mount my home partition somewhere, I don't have to figure out where it is, I can just refer to it as max/home and mount it where I like. e.g. mount -L max/home /home Likewise for any other partitions. If I rip the max drive out to pull files from it on another Linux installation, it's easy. Firstly, all my drive partitions have unique labels (so there'll be no mount point clashes, the other drive will have fred/home, fred/root, etc, it's differently named). Try and put in two drives with a partition labelled "/home" and you're in for grief. And the installer malarkey of avoiding duplicates by calling things /boot1, /boot2, /, and /1, is far from ideal. Secondly, I don't have to care where it is. I can "mount -L max/home /mnt" and pull files off, or fix things, or whatever. Let the computer do the grunt work of finding where your partitions are, automatically. It's almost a given that at some point users might have to connect two drives to one box to resolve an issue. It's less mental gymnastics if the system works in a clearly coherent and predictable manner. -- (This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
