Adding Disks to system

[Chris Martin]

I second all this about labelling the drives.  It makes them much easier to
manage...  But I mount my drives via UUID - that way I never have clashes.
I'm a bit old school and used to mount by device name.  But I have seen my
device names move around live the proverbial shell game.  So I bit the
bullet and mounted via UUID.  I still label them so they are readable,

you can map between labels and UUIDS by using the commands

ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/
ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

But

sudo blkid -L

is much easier

Also don't think you can label FAT (and probably NTFS) file systems. So UUID
has an advantage there as well


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Chris Martin
m: 0419812371
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On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 12:16 AM, Karl Bowden <karlbowden at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 29 April 2010 20:38, Paul Gear <paul at libertysys.com.au> wrote:
>
>>  On 28/04/10 14:00, Chris Martin wrote:
>>
>> Peter.
>>
>> This the short version...
>> Contact me if you need more specific instructions
>>
>>
>> A few suggestions, given that this was the short version.  :-)
>>
>>
>>
>> Once you have the drive installed.
>>
>> use "gparted" - this is a GUI tool that will partition and format the new
>> disk
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure if gparted allows you to specify a label for the filesystem.
>> If it doesn't, then you can add one later (with e2label), but i would
>> strongly recommend adding a label, since then it makes no difference where
>> the disk is connected.  I would suggest a label of something like "/home".
>>
>>
>>  The mount it in a convenient location (say /mnt)
>>
>> Copy your existing /home to /mnt - takeing care to preserve permissions
>> and ownership
>>
>>
>> rsync is probably the best way to do this: you would run "rsync -SHavx
>> /home/ /mnt/" (don't miss the trailing slashes).
>>
>>
>>  umount /mnt,
>>
>> mount your drive as /home - this will replace the directory /home with the
>> content of the drive (however the original data in /home will still be
>> preserved, just not accessible while the drive is mounted)
>>
>> test..  test.. test..
>>
>> if all goes well, unmount /home,
>> double check it is unmounted ...  and check again
>>
>> delete the origional /home contents
>>
>> mount the drive as /home (again)
>>
>>
>> Great advice there - mounting over the contents allows an absolutely
>> painless recovery method if it doesn't work: just unmount the filesystem and
>> you're back exactly where you were.
>>
>>
>> edit /etc/fstab to make the change persistant across reboot and have /home
>> mounted automatically on reboot
>>
>>
>> When you edit fstab, use LABEL=/home for the device instead of /dev/sdb1
>> or whatever you've been using so far.  That way, you can move the drive
>> around without any issues.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>
> I'd just like to second Paul's advice for using filesystem labels. If your
> going to be adding disks in the future too or changing anything around it
> makes life so much easier. It's almost like Ubuntu's use of UUID's for
> filesystem identifiers, except readable. The trade off for
> the reasonableness being increase of the chance that there will be multiple
> filesystems with the same label.
> Ie: I already have my harddrive partitioned to with root, home and swap
> and labelled as written. I connect a friends harddrive to recover his home
> folder for him, but his fs label is home too. Clash. But by that time at
> least you will be aware of what is happening and should be pretty to fix.
> This is not a warning though. Absolutely go for it. The benefits are great
> when you see them pay off, just be aware of the possibility of a clash and
> don't be afraid to ask for help if it happens.
>
> - Karl
>
> --
> ubuntu-au mailing list
> ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
>
>
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