Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 145762
Mount picks wrong "LABEL="-specified partition if >1 HDDs present
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:58 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021203 Description of problem: For some years RedHat's installer lists partitions in /etc/fstab as "LABEL=" instead of "/dev/hda*" or "/dev/sda*". This works fine while the set of HDDs is constant. BUT: when one adds another drive from a similar computer (for copying, backup, maintenance, rescue, etc.), the "LABEL=" stuff prevents normal operation. For some strange reason, instead of mounting FIRST partition which has requested label, mount uses LAST one. This either makes such disk-swapping impossible, or forces a user to touch /etc/fstab, listing there /dev/hda* instead of "LABEL="s. In either case, such behaviour is very inconvenient, and seems to be absolutely unjustified and useless. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install two identical systems, let's name them Bonnie and Clyde, so that /usr is on a separate partition, e.g. /dev/hda5. 2. Move Clyde's HDD to Bonnie, so that it becomes /dev/hdb 3. Boot the system Actual Results: /usr is mounted from /dev/hdb5 -- i.e., 2nd (originally Clyde's) drive. Expected Results: /usr should be mounted from /dev/hda5. Additional info: Bug #101570 suggests that this can be a kernel's bug, but for me as a user, it is mount's bug, and since I'm not an expert in this area, I file a bugreport against util-linux.
I believe mount is supposed to just plain balk in this case...
I think answer from mount should be error message 'duplicate - not mounted'. There is no reason why the mount command should be mount first or last HDD if there is duplicate LABEL. In FC4 should be available workaround that allows to define priority of duplicate LABELs in file /etc/fstab.order.
Since there are insufficient details provided in this report for us to investigate the issue further, and we have not received the feedback we requested, we will assume the problem was not reproduceable or has been fixed in a later update for this product.