Is it safe to "jump back into LM12"?

[krustybaguette]

This question is posed because I went from LM11 to LM12 when it was first released but due to an abundance of problems I decided to revert to LM9 until April 2013 when presumably LM13 will replace LM9 as the LTS (Long Term Support) release of LM.
Now I've discovered a problem that I think I created when I installed LM9 (from a USB stick).

I posted a question about this problem at http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=96215) but have had no response in almost a month. Research on other sites leads me to believe that installing LM9 from a usb stick while both of my hard drives were present resulted in /dev/sda being applied to the usb stick, /dev/sdb to my primary drive, and probably /dev/sdc to the second hard drive. However since those designations are applied at boottime my primary drive gets changed to /dev/sda when the second drive is removed (whether to use the optical drive OR to use my laptop separated from its docking station.

Some of the proposed solutions refer to usind udev rules to assign permanent designations and using UUID as opposed to /dev/sd# type designations. I wonder if I reinstall LM9, 10, 11, or 12 from the optical drive (rather than the usb stick) would result in the primary hard drive getting a designation of /dev/sda as it had a couple of upgrade/downgrade cycles ago. At that time I was able to swap out the second hard drive and the optical drive without rendering my main LM installation unbootable.

Any comments from the peanut gallery gratefully accepted.

[Oscar799]

It would have been better to bump your original question
The same question about the same thing from the same person appearing in two places only causes confusion
I deleted your older post

[AlbertP]

My Mint 12 uses UUID's to find its partitions, so the changing of /dev/sdXY names doesn't make the system unbootable. I think Mint 13 will do it this way as well.

[krustybaguette]

My Mint 12 uses UUID's to find its partitions, so the changing of /dev/sdXY names doesn't make the system unbootable. I think Mint 13 will do it this way as well.

Is it possible to edit grub or other configuration files so they reflect UUIDs rather than the /dev/sdCONVENTION? If so, which files?

kb

[AlbertP]

In /etc/fstab it's quite straightforward, just replacing /dev/sdXY with UUID=

For example here is my fstab on Mint 12:

Code: Select all

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=08701681-88db-45ba-b5e3-afa0ae7b60f7 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=da78cc2a-0b69-48a4-b454-9abaec52a9a6 none            swap    sw              0       0

The lines with a # are comments and so don't need to be changed. The two partitions, root and swap, already have UUID's written by the Mint installer.

I don't really know how to change grub. Grub indeed uses (hdX,msdosY) codes for /dev/sdXY (X being a number, starting with 0).
However, Grub does not use the Linux device drivers, instead it uses the BIOS ways of accessing the disk. Probably the "first disk" (hd0) in this BIOS environment is the disk from which you're booting, instead of the actual first disk.

[krustybaguette]

In /etc/fstab it's quite straightforward, just replacing /dev/sdXY with UUID=

For example here is my fstab on Mint 12:

Code: Select all

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=08701681-88db-45ba-b5e3-afa0ae7b60f7 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=da78cc2a-0b69-48a4-b454-9abaec52a9a6 none            swap    sw              0       0

The lines with a # are comments and so don't need to be changed. The two partitions, root and swap, already have UUID's written by the Mint installer.

Thanks Albert,

I'll give that a shot in my current LM9 install. When you installed LM12 did you have to make that change or did LM12 automatically use the UUID convention? I'm not convinced I want to upgrade until LM13 becomes available as I had video problems and other problems when I had LM12 installed previously.

kb

I've looked my fstab over and it pretty much looks like yours except I also have a /home partition. Each of the references to a /dev/sdXXX are in commented lines as in yours so there doesn't appear to be anything to edit in /etc/fstab. Perhaps the problem lies in grub.

Kb