Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Old IDE drives and the "newer" PATA kernel drivers

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 27 Aug 2010, at 17:06, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:

> On 08/27/2010 07:02 PM, J. Roeleveld wrote:
>> On Friday 27 August 2010 17:57:01 Bill Longman wrote:
>>> On 08/27/2010 01:10 AM, J. Roeleveld wrote:
>>>> On Friday 27 August 2010 09:49:41 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>>>> Anyway, make sure you have a bootable Linux CD/DVD handy.  That  
>>>>> way, you
>>>>> won't be able to blow anything up and can boot from it in order to
>>>>> change your /etc/fstab and grub conf.
>>>>
>>>> Alternatively, give your partitions Labels and reconfigure /etc/ 
>>>> fstab to
>>>> use those.
>>>> Then you don't have to worry about the changes to the device-names.
>>>
>>> I second Joost's recommendation. I don't think you can use labels  
>>> on the
>>> kernel command line, so your grub will have to know for sure which
>>> device to boot.
>>
>> Actually, you can:
>> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot-rootfs/index.html
>>
>> (Read the section below "Use a label"):
>>
>> fstab:
>> LABEL=ROOT          /         ext3    defaults        1 1
>> LABEL=BOOT          /boot     ext3    defaults        1 2
>> LABEL=SWAP          swap      swap    defaults        0 0
>> LABEL=HOME          /home     ext3    nosuid,auto     1 2
>
> This syntax never worked here.  Always resulted in an unbootable  
> system.  Only the /dev/disk/by-label/ syntax works reliably.

Because you need to use the `root=/dev/sdaX` format in GRUB?

I think an appropriate initrd/initramfs is required - I'm not sure if  
there are any other requirements - to use labels in GRUB. I think it's  
common to do things this way on RedHat systems, maybe with some other  
distros - that's what fouled me up when I tried using labels in GRUB;  
I just found grub.conf examples using them, and was unaware of this  
requirement.


Stroller.