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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/0 Description of problem: When there is more than one ext2/3 partitions with the same label, the ``wrong one'' may be mounted, and in addition /etc/mtab may get wrong information. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mount-2.11n-12 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. One needs two partitions with the same LABEL (in my case, on two hard drives, both of which have one with LABEL=/ and one with LABEL=/data), which is referenced in /etc/fstab only once. 2. Boot the system 3. Look at output of df and cat /etc/mtab Actual Results: 1. In my case, after boot the /data partition was mounted from the second hard drive; 2. But the root partition was mounted from the first (correctly...); 3. And yet df and /etc/mtab indicate that the root partition from the second hard drive is mounted Expected Results: 1. For the /data partition, I was surprised, but I guess this is understandable, although maybe a message during mount might have been helpful 2. For the second, although it's good that the correct root partition is mounted, this should also be indicated in /etc/mtab Additional info: This is a possible issue when using a hard-drive from one computer on another one, since many partitions would then have duplicate labels. In the case above, the second root partition contains /usr, /home, /usr/local, so I don't know what would happen in case those were separate. This might be a problem, or simply something surprising. /dev/hda is the main HD, with the ``right'' root partition /dev/hdd is a second HD from another RH 7.3 computer. Version of mount : mount-2.11n-12 It looks like this could be related to bugs 72019 and/or 57286.
If you are mounting by label, and you have two partitions with the same label, the results are undefined. In general, "don't do that". The 'hard drive from another computer' case is unfortunate, but controllable.