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Re: Relabel partition didn't work



Manon Metten wrote:
On 4/5/07, *Douglas Allan Tutty* <dtutty@porchlight.ca <mailto:dtutty@porchlight.ca>> wrote:

    On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 07:06:51AM -0500, Manon Metten wrote:
     > Linux debian 2.6.18-4-486 #1 Mon Mar 26 16:39:10 UTC 2007 i686
    GNU/Linux
     >
     > I want to change the name and access point of a partition on my
    second hd.
     > It's labeled /xyz now (coz I could think of no better name when
    installing
     > etch).
     > I tried this:
     >
     > e2label /dev/hdb4
     > xyz
     > e2label /dev/hdb4 store
     > e2label /dev/hdb4
     > store
     > So seemingly the label has changed.
     > I edited /etc/fstab accordingly:
     >
> changing /dev/hdb4 /xyz ext3 defaults 0 2
     >           to  /dev/hdb4       /store         ext3    defaults
     > 0       2
     >
     > Then I rebooted, only to find this message popping up during boot
    time:
     >
     >   mount: mount point /store does not exist
     >
     > There was no further error during boot time and kde was up and
    running.
     > Then I'd reset everything and could mount and access /xyz as before.
     >
     > What did I do wrong and how do I change /xyz to /store?

    You're confusing disk lables with mount points.  Your fstab doesn't
    have
    disklables in it.  You told mount to mount /dev/hdb4 on /store, so it
    looks for the directory /store, which doesn't exist.

    So backup:

    What are you trying to do?

    Doug.



Hi Doug,

After fiddling around with sarge for some months, I installed etch a couple of weeks ago. I've done lots of reading and I'm following this list for a while, but I'm new to debian anyway.

I have 4 partitions on my 2nd hd, swap, /tmp, /var & /xyz.
/xyz is the 4th primary partition on my 2nd hd.
When installing etch, at some point partman asked for a mount point for that partition and I entered /xyz.

I use this xyz partition only to store some .iso's and other large files, so I want rename/relabel it to /store. If I do mkdir /store, that would create the dir/mount point on my 1st hd where / is located (correct?). Thus the question is: how to change /xyz to /store on my 2nd hd, so I can do eg. something like this:

  mv  ~/*.iso  /store

so it moves *.iso from ~ on my 1st hd to /store on my 2nd hd.

Greetings, Manon.


@ Joe Heart
 > What in the world is e2label?  It doesn't show up in my search.
I fould e2label in /sbin, read the man and tried to use it.

 > What is it today, national "People from other distros" day?
Huh? Sounds like a warm 'welcome to debian' to me.
I guess you don't have the monopoly of wisdom too.

BTW: it's SHE, not he.

Anyway, greetings to you too, Manon.

Hi, Manon,

There's nothing to do to the second hard disk. Think of the mount point as directions to the kernel on where to go look for a disk. But this is a logical reference to a physical device. So, first, some background on devices.

Generally, the device names are pretty much fixed in a system, over time (this does not hold very well for SCSI devices, particularly when using pluggable storage such as USB, but that's another story). So, for a pair of IDE type hard disks, you will have the device names 'hda' and 'hdb'. The partitions on these devices then add numbers to the basic name:

	hda1	hdb1
	hda2	hdb2

And so on. The above is complicated by the presence of an extended partition, but it doesn't sound like you have one. So, for your 2nd hard disk, you should have disks named 'hdb1', 'hdb2', 'hdb3', 'hdb4'.

These are names the system gives to the devices, which can be found in the /dev directory. These names have nothing to do with labels. Debian will, by default, make labels for disks based on the mount point given during installation. Anything done after that will not get a label unless you put one on it.

And though labels can be used to help get around the pluggable device problem mentioned above, the default setup just uses the disk names and directory mount point names.

This next piece can be a bit confusing, but I think is essential to understanding how all this works: Each and every disk partition has its own 'root' directory. This is what users of DOS/Windows systems have to put up with: C: has a \, D: has a \, A: has a \, on and on....

This is hidden in unix/linux systems by mounting. What a mount does is to tell the kernel that when a mount point is accessed on disk1, move to disk2 root and process from there. This might look better as a simple picture:

        BootDisk                               HardDisk2
           /                     point)----->      /
        etc  usr      ----(mount              bob jim jane

What you work with is simply /usr/bob or /usr/jane, without concern for which disk it's on.

So, you want to change the mount point? Create a directory (store in your case) somewhere in the filesystem. Others have suggested /mnt or /media, but there are really no restrictions on where it goes, put it where it makes logical sense to put it.

Edit /etc/fstab and find the current mount point, change it to 'store' and your done. The name of the disk does not change and so it will now mount in the new location on your next boot.

If you want it to move now, without rebooting, do, as root:

    umount /xyz
    mount /store

And you're done.

Sorry for the long winded explanation, I'm too much the teacher at heart.

Bob

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