On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 05:26:22PM -0200, Gustavo Franco wrote:
> >While you are right, I see one special case. It is not the case here but
> >if you change your booting devices, you will need to rebuild the
> >initramfs. I am mainly speaking about adding a drive or controller which
> >change the ordering and name of the others.
>
> You're right, thanks for pointing it out, but me as both user and
> admin don't do that usually.
>
> Btw, if you change your hard disk controller only (hardware raid?)
> you're probably not a newcomer user. Unfortunately, it isn't that easy
> figure out what's going on from the boot loader, kernel and the
> whole system (read /etc/fstab at first) - but per filesystem id (or label)
> boot and mount should be worked out for our next release, IMHO.
>
> Adding a drive that changes the name from the original drive sounds
> like a controller bug or kernel bug though.
No not necessarily, let me give you a scenario: You are running fine with
your onboard controller for a while but you feel a little tight on disk
space and you decide to add a drive. You also need to add a pci controller
for it since you ide (or sata for that matter) onboard is packed. But for
some reason the add on card is loaded before the onboard one, which shifts
all the drives down... It is not a kernel bug, just a timing 'feature'.
As for the fstab, you would probably be stuck if you use the partition
directly. And since the fstab is used for the initramfs creation, you
would need to regenerate it again after. But there is another way than
labels. LVM is not dependent on the name of the PV anymore, if the name
of one does change, lvm will find it with its uuid and load it normally.
That is one more advantage in using it rather that static partitions.