Description of problem: 1) I give all of my drives nicknames and then mount them according to those nicknames. this disambiguates LABEL=/ mount points and I *highly* recommend that diskdruid just "get it" about prelabeled partitions... a. ask for a short drive nickname (or make one up) b. label partitions as "nick:/mountpoint" c. detect this pattern when doing future installs and have diskdruid do the work of assigning partitions according to their labels. for partitions that are reformatted, retain the drive's nickname. 2) WHEN IDENTICAL LABELS ARE PRESENT: the kernel seems to push partition labels onto a stack and then pop them off when searching. this has the effect of mounting the LAST drive to match (hdc) instead of the first drive to match (hda) and this is the opposite of what the BIOS boot sequence does, so it's almost always going to be the wrong thing to do. 3) OPTIONALLY, extra drives can be automatically mounted according to their labels. here's my little bit of shell hackery to do that... ## stig/uways (pts/0) -- 0 jobs -- Sun Aug 03 -- 20:40:10 ## ## /home/stig >>>> wh !! wh hdprobe hdprobe is a function hdprobe () { hd=${1-hdc}; shift; for dev in $(echo p |/sbin/fdisk /dev/$hd 2>/dev/null|grep ' 83 ' | sed -e 's/ .*//'); do mpoint="$(tune2fs -l $dev | sed -n 's=.*volume name: *=/hc=p' | sed 's,/hc\([a-z0-9]*\):/*,/\1/,' )"; echo "fsck -a $dev ; mount $* $dev $mpoint"; done | sort +6 } ## stig/uways (pts/0) -- 0 jobs -- Sun Aug 03 -- 20:40:14 ## ## /home/stig >>>> hdprobe fsck -a /dev/hdc6 ; mount /dev/hdc6 /ix/ fsck -a /dev/hdc8 ; mount /dev/hdc8 /ix/home ## stig/uways (pts/0) -- 0 jobs -- Sun Aug 03 -- 20:40:20 ## ## /home/stig >>>> tune2fs -l /dev/hdc6 |grep olume Filesystem volume name: ix:/ -- stig
The behavior in the installer has changed somewhat so that we'll preserve existing labels. The rest of the stuff is either out of the purview of the installer or not going to happen. We can't handle every possible way that someone may want to do something -- as soon as I add one pattern, there will be 50 other people with their own specific requests for how to do things which will get out of hand quickly.
There *IS* a "problem" with the way that redhat does disk labels and/or the way the kernel goes looking for them. Once upon a time, i could take a munged system disk from one box and repair it by mounting it from a working system... (hda on old box, hdc on repair box)...(or maybe i just like to move my disks around for kicks)... Nowadays, with redhat labelling all the disks the same things, and mounting the root partition according to label, I get the hosed disk showing up as the rootfs on the it-worked-before repair system. *THE SEARCH ORDER IS REVERSED* (to repeat a portion of the original bug report): 2) WHEN IDENTICAL LABELS ARE PRESENT: the kernel seems to push partition labels onto a stack and then pop them off when searching. this has the effect of mounting the LAST drive to match (hdc) instead of the first drive to match (hda) and this is the opposite of what the BIOS boot sequence does, so it's almost always going to be the wrong thing to do.
This is not at all an anaconda problem, though. mount does the mounting (and searching by label).