fstab and LABEL=

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Mon Oct 23 03:29:25 UTC 2006


Tim:
>> I do wish things were done more like how it was on the Amiga:  Device
>> names were written into the device, as were volume names, and the file
>> system (if you wanted it to be).  Plugging the drive into anything meant
>> it was labelled and identified the same on any computer.

Les Mikesell:
> What happened when you moved drives around or image-copied them
> and ended up with two of the same label in the same machine?  Did
> it do something reasonable or refuse to boot?   What did it do
> with filesystems using different conventions?

It did some reasonable things...

You had a boot menu that could pick the drive to boot from, that was
part of the firmware - no GRUB or LILO nastiness.  Each drive had a boot
priority, stored on the drive.  That did allow you to rip drives in and
out, and not have to do any messing about.  The fallback would be
booted, automatically, if need be.  Determined by the drives themselves,
not any external configuration.  Whichever drive was booted was known as
the SYS: drive, and any sensible person would write their boot scripts
to use SYS: as the root, if they wanted it to boot completely from just
that drive.

If you tried to put in two "HD0:" named drives (first Hard Disk - yes
they also count from zero), the second would be come "HD0.1:".
Likewise, if you put in two drives with a "Data:" volume name.  If you
really needed it the other way around, there was an extremely simple
solution:  Swap the drives around.  Though we tended to avoid that by
using device names peculiar to drives (e.g. SDH0: for the first Seagate
HD partition/drive, QDH0: for a Quantum one, but the choice of names was
up to the user).  Likewise, with volume labels (Workbench, System, Data,
Programs, whatever).  Generally, things worked by volume labels, and it
didn't matter what the device label was.

Each drive could use different filesystems, if you wanted.  Even the
partitions could, though I can't recall if you could store custom file
systems per partition (I think so).  Storing them on the drive meant
that you could transplant a drive between boxes, and not require that
the other box had the file system installed into the OS.

All in all, it was rather neat at how it handled such things.  I
certainly miss the ease that I could swap drives around between boxes.
Though, more so, I miss the fact that one OS was installed on my system
for umpteen years with *no* need of replacement or repair.  Applications
were another matter, but the longevity of the OS was a godsend.

-- 
(Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
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