Re: Unusable free space?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> You're worried that that a mass renaming of partition numbers will
>>> cause your system to not reboot?  That's why LABEL and UUID are now
>>> used in grub (lilo is restricted to device names) and fstab.
>> Call me a luddite but UUID < partition numbers for the simple reason
>> I can manually write down numbers and be pretty sure I didn't transpose
>> one of the 4 pieces of data required to get it to work.  Every time I
>> see a UUID I just wanna thunk my head against the desk.
> Which is why I use labels instead.

Indeed I hate UUIDs (unreadable, ugly, and meaningless).

I just wasted a few hours yesterday because Grub2 insisted to look at
another partition when booting (no idea where that other partition is,
but it looks like Grub2 somehow found some old /boot partition with the
same UUID as my real /boot partition, probably because I just
copied/moved the partition itself rather than only its contents).

> I can use labels that are words that make sense WRT the usage of the
> partition:

Labels are indeed much better: readable, meaningful, ...

If you use LVM, you'll automatically give "labels" to your "partitions"
(called logical volumes), so you don't need to worry about how to give
labels to swap, ext3, vfat, ... (each one uses a different option and
command for it, of course).


        Stefan