Re: [gentoo-user] duplicate gentoo system - errors

[Michael]

On Tuesday, 24 November 2020 09:20:52 GMT Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Monday, 23 November 2020 19:02:57 GMT antlists wrote:
> > If you're messing about with disks, partitions, etc, you NEED to have a
> > basic understanding of UUIDs.
>
> That may be true if you have more than one disk of a given type, but if you
> have only one SATA drive and one NVMe, for instance, there's no chance of
> their being misnumbered at boot.
>
> My workstation has one NVMe drive and two SATAs. They're always detected in
> the same order, so I've no need to render my fstab illegible with UUIDs. I
> could use labels, but why bother? The old system ain't broke, so I've no
> need to fix it.

It depends on the bus and disk technology.  I have an ARM driven box with a 
conventional 1TB spinning SATA drive and a USB stick.  You can never tell 
which one will be detected as /dev/sda and which as /dev/sdb.  If you have 
more than one pluggable devices the same identification problem is likely to 
arise.  LABELs and/or UUIDs solve this problem - reliably.


> Can you imagine an fstab with 22 partitions specified with UUIDs? Doesn't
> bear thinking about.

Copying and pasting the output of blkid helps complete the fstab easily and 
commented lines allow me to explain to myself block device location and 
purpose, should I need to revisit it some months/years later.