How to label a disk

[Matthew Flaschen]

Francois wrote:
> Hi,
> Just got an hd failure, and I'm in the process to reinstall everything.
> I plan to have a backup this time. I have here an old hd (40 giga), and
> using gparted, I deleted all partitions on it. Then I recreate one
> partition as shown in this screen capture :
> 
> http://www.arvernes.com/files/gparted.png
> 
> What mean those flags (boot and lba) on the right? 

See http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/html_chapter/parted_4.html
The boot flag is used to indicate which partition of the disk to boot
from.  The LBA flag is used to indicate logical block addressing, as
opposed to CHS (cylinder-head-sector).

> Do I have to reformat everything to get rid of them ?

You don't want to get rid of LBA.

> This HD, will not be my boot disk, just
> a backup I want to mount and umount during the backup process.

If you're just doing regular data backups, you're right that you don't
need the boot flag.  To remove it in GParted, right-click the partition,
click "Manage Flags", then uncheck "boot" (sorry, I don't know the
French localization for this).

> Something else : I want to rename that HD to "backups". I saw the
> command line : "sudo e2label <device> new_name". maybe a stupid
> question, but is it in my case : e2label /dev/sda4 or /dev/sda5 ??
> Thank you.francois

sda5.  That's the partition the ext3 filesystem is on.  The "extended"
partition is just an artificial construct designed to allow more than 4
partitions on a drive.  Incidentally, you could get rid of it since you
have only one partition.  However, that would require reformatting.

Matt Flaschen