[SGVLUG] RH9, upgrading from 2.4.20-8 to 2.4.31 and initrd

[Dustin]

On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, David Lawyer wrote:

> Searching using Google but not bothering to read the messages, someone
> claimed that LABEL ... doesn't work anymore.  I use lilo so I'm not
> sure.

This is most definitely not true as of Debian Sarge and 2.6.8.  That is
how I mount /, /home, and swap.  (I bet you didn't know you could mount
swap by label, did you?)

> ...But most write something like: "ro root=/dev/hda2" instead of
> using LABEL.

That works fine for most people and I did it for years.  One problem with
it is if you play around with your partition scheme a lot you can render
the machine unbootable if you don't edit fstab correctly before rebooting
(no biggie, that just means it's Knoppix time, but still very annoying).  
Labels can make your fstab static and stable even when the partitions are
not.

A similar and probably more common case is when you swap drives around in 
ways that change the ordering.  Then if fstab lists devices explicitly 
then Linux is subject to a minor version of the DOS lettering problem.  
Labels fix that as well.

Dustin