On Sunday, 20 May 2018 4:09:12 PM AEST Rick Moen via luv-main wrote:
This was posted a decade or so ago to the Silicon Valley Linux User Group by one of the leading experts who'd just solved the problem after being stumped by it for days. (I can't remember the exact signs of distress the system gave, if any, before falling over.)
I didn't try to replicate the problem. I merely made a mental note that, IMO, this was an adequate reason to eschew disk labels completely: one fewer bizarre failure mode to watch out for.
I always imagined that someone was handed an account of that shambles and told 'Please design for the Linux community a disc identifier system that avoids all such failure modes through the expedient of using an absolutely guaranteed, totally unique identifier. Feel free to sacrifice all other objectives such as ergonomics and human-compatibility. Just be absolutely certain the identifiers are unique, at any cost.' Eh volia! UUIDs.
You have to be careful when using dd on disk images as matching UUIDs cause problems. Also for RAID configurations using the DOS partition table you can use "dd if=sda of=sdb bs=1024k count=10" to copy the partition table and boot loader configuration to a new disk. But that causes big problems with GPT. As an aside does anyone know of a fdisk type program that makes it easy to copy the partition layout from one disk to another? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/