changing partition designations

Robert Holtzman holtzm at cox.net
Wed Jul 2 03:42:19 UTC 2008


On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 12:11:52PM -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> Just had occasion to look at my /etc/mtab and the partition names had
>> changed from /dev/sda* to /dev/sdb*. My /etc/fstab still shows /dev/sda*.
>> This *may* have happened when I recently used gparted to create 3 new
>> partitions (which I have yet to install anything on).
>
> No, that's not related.

I didn,t think so.

>> What happened and
>> can I rename back to /dev/sda* or do I live with it and edit /etc/fstab?
>
> Don't worry, the naming depends on timing issues (which device was
> detected first during boot).  For this reason Ubuntu sets up /etc/fstab
> to use UUIDs and not device names.

I'm not worried, just annoyed. Hence the question about recovering.

>> The UUID's match those in fstab.
>
> That's good.  I'm sure the /dev/sda* names are left in the comments only
> (lines starting with a '#' character), otherwise your system wouldn't
> have booted.

I haven't had occasion to reboot since I noticed the problem.

>> The danger, of course, is that if anything happened that would force me
>> to reboot, such as a power outage, I'd be screwed....I think.
>
> No.
>
>> Any pointers *greatly* appreciated!
>
> I'm sure there's a page on ubuntu.com explaining all this... probably
> this one: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID

Doesn't address re identifying partitions.

The central question is: is there a way to change the partition 
designations back to /dev/sda*?

BTW sda* files don't exist in /dev anymore.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
To enjoy life take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
                                           Lazarus Long




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