Redux

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 14 February 2011 19:24, Rem P Roberti <remegius at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:38:28 -0800, Rem P Roberti<rem at remdog.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I need to ask this question again in the hopes that something will come
>>> of it.  In the process of going through an update (I finally got that
>>> sorted out) all of my partitions were renamed.  Here they are:
>>>
>>> Filesystem               1K-blocks       Used       Avail      Capacity
>>>        Mounted on
>>> /dev/label/rootfs0    507630         326734   140286       70%
>>>           /
>>> devfs                                  1               1          0
>>>     100%                /dev
>>> /dev/label/var0      1012974         170386   761552       18%
>>>          /var
>>> /dev/label/usr0     33292236       9358560 21270298     31%
>>>    /usr
>>> linprocfs                          4                   4          0
>>>      100%    /usr/compat/linux/proc
>>> /dev/md0                789518                 16     726342      0%
>>>                /tmp
>>>
>>> As you can see, root, which was once /dev/ad0s1a, is now
>>> /dev/label/rootfs0, and /var, which was once /dev/ad0s1d, is now
>>> /dev/label/var0.  Along with these changes the /etc/fstab was
>>> automatically modified to allow the boot process to take place.  Can
>>> someone give me a heads up as to what is going on here.
>>
>> Seems that you - or something - did make the switch from
>> device names to labels. Maybe your kernel now includes
>> GEOM functionality for work with labels? But I don't know
>> of a process that changes /etc/fstab automatically...
>>
>> You can still use the device names for the /etc/fstab
>> entries, you just need to make sure that you select
>> the correct names (as you described above). Then there
>> should be no problem as labels are optional.
>>
>>
>
>
> Honestly, I certainly didn't make the change from device names to labels.  I
> wouldn't know how to do that, although I gather from what you've said that
> the kernel config file contains that information.  I'm not sure, however,
> what you mean when you say that I can still use the device names, as the
> system will not boot unless fstab has in it the entries shown above.

FreeBSD is wonderful, don't get me wrong,
but it is not magical.  Partitions don't just
accrue labels and /etc/fstab doesn't edit
itself.
Are you running PCBSD?

Anyway, if you want to go back to device names
in the /dev/ad0s1[a-g] scheme you can extract
the correct names with:
geom label list
(you might want to pipe it into a pager)
then edit your /etc/fstab accordingly and
reboot.
Although, why bother really?  The label names
may come in handy if you have to move the hdd
to another machine to extract the information,
or for various other reasons.

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