Installation changing the Partition Label

[John M Cavallo]

On Monday 31 March 2008 12:44:24 pm Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 07:17:05AM -0400, John M Cavallo wrote:
> > I believe anaconda did write a label of '/' when one already existed. I
> > will try to confirm this this evening.
>
> If that is really the case that would be a nasty bug; especially
> that anaconda was avoiding doing that for quite a while.

I reinstalled with the root partition of my Fedora 8 labeled '/' and the 9 
partition '/f9' and it kept the name. Apologies for the mistake.

>
> OTOH it is been often very annoying that anaconda does not have an
> option which would allow you to specify your own labels.  This is
> not a show-stopper though but it could be a serious PITA at times.

I agree.

> > On the other point, it should recycle the labels on partitions
> > that are only reformatted not resized, since other installations
> > on that disk will rely on those. Why should it rewrite the
> > partition table when the partition aren't changed?
>
> Labels are not on partitions but on file systems so not resizing
> is not relevant but reformatting is.  If anaconda wrote labels
> which collide with ones which already exist that would be really
> the same bug as the above.  A way to recover would be to boot
> "rescue", without mounting any file systems, and to fix offending
> labels from there.
>
> If you are indeed seeing such problem, and an idea is to skip label
> checking in anaconda, then appending some random, long enough,
> string to "usual" labels would make in practice such label
> collisions highly unlikely.
>
>    Michal