Recent linux versions (yes, I’m talking kernel here – linux is not an operating system) introduce new IDE drivers. It implies a device naming convention change. Instead of hda, hdb, etc, you get sda, sdb, etc, just like SCSI drives.
I have three hard disks on my main workstation – plenty of partitions. So in my case, it makes sense to use a unique identifier for each partition so nothing breaks up whenever I add/remove a drive or boot on an older kernel with the previous IDE drivers.
There are already uniques ids for each partition available using the command blkid. It returns unbearables and meaningless, but very uniques, ids like af8485cf-de97-4daa-b3d9-d23aff685638.
So it is best, for me at least, to label partitions properly according to their content and physical disposition, which makes for uniques id too in the end.
For ext3 partitions, I just did:
e2label /dev/sda2 sg250debian64
e2label /dev/sda3 sg250home
For the swap, e2label cannot help, so we set the label with mkswap, recreating it:
swapoff /dev/sda1
mkswap -L sg250swap /dev/sda1
swapon -L sg250swap
For ntfs partitions, I did:
apt-get install ntfsprogs
ntfslabel /dev/sdb1 hi150suxor
ntfslabel /dev/sdb2 hi150suxor2
Then, /etc/fstab must be edited as:
LABEL=sg250swap none swap sw 0 0LABEL=sg250debian64 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
LABEL=sg250home /home ext3 defaults 1 2LABEL=hi150suxor /mnt/suxor ntfs-3g defaults,user,noauto 0 0
LABEL=hi150suxor2 /mnt/suxor2 ntfs-3g defaults,user,noauto 0 0
Finally, grub (or any other boot loader) config should be updated to reflect that. However, unless I’m mistaken, with grub2 as shipped by debian, everything is generated usings scripts that does not seem to handle labels 😦
# cd /scratch 