New update suggest identifying disks by label or UUID

[marlar]

Hi,

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I have been on vacation for 3 weeks and there are soooo many new posts !

Anyway, I am doing a system upgrade and now I am confronted with this message (loosely translated from Danish, so the exact wordings may differ):

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The new linux kernel has different drivers for some PATA (IDE) controllers. The names of some harddisks, CDROM or tape units may change. 

It is recommended that you identify disk units in configuration files by label or UUID instead of device name which will work in both old and new kernel versions.

If you choose to upgrade the configuraitons automatically, you must update the device IDs yourself before next restart or the system might not start.

Update disk device IDs in system the configuration

<Yes>    <No>

Ok, what am I supposed to choose now? If I read it correctly, then if I do an automatic upgrade I have to update something manually myself afterwards. And if i do a manual upgrade, what am I supposed to change?

[Roken]

The obvious one that springs to mind is grub. I don't use IDE, so I haven't seen this message, but you should first check whether your grub entries are by uuid or by /dev. To check, type in a terminal:

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sudo more /boot/grub/grub.cfg

As you work through the file you will see your boot choices listed. If they identify disk by UUID (the giveaway is root=UUID followed by a long number, and -set followed by those same numbers) then you are good to go - no changes needed. However, if grub lists drives as /dev/hdaX (or similar) then grub is looking at exactly what the warning tells you it shouldn't be. To fix it, before the updates you could first try:

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sudo update-grub

Then look at grub.cfg again and see if it now lists disks by UUID. If so, then again you are good to go. If not, it looks like you will have to manually edit grub.cfg (even though you shouldn't) to use UUID rather than /dev. First you need the UUID of each disk. To get those:

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ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/*

This will list all disks (including CDRom etc). You are interested in those entries that give hda0, or sda0 etc on the second line. The first line will give the UUID of each of those disks. In grub.cfg you need to substitute each of the "root=" entries to "root=UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx represents the UUID of each disk.

With luck, grub.cfg will already be showing the UUIDs and so you should have no problems.

[marlar]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply!

I did the update-grub command but it turned out in the next step that it was actually referring to fstab. I wonder why it didn't tell me that from the start.

It worked well and the computer booted fine, but then X didn't start. Something in the recent update broke my ATI driver so I had to disable it and change the display to the internal graphics adapter in the BIOS to get going. Now I must look in the forum why the update broke my ATI driver ...

Martin

[Roken]

If you had a kernel upgrade you need to reinstall the ATI drivers.

[marlar]

Thanks, but that did not help. See http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 50#p412750