Re: grub and root=label=

[Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us>]

On Monday 08 September 2008 12:02:27 pm Greg White wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if support for root=label= is coming to grub anytime soon? 
> I found someone who wrote a patch that did this back in 2004
> (http://osdir.com/ml/boot-loaders.grub.bugs/2004-02/msg00105.html).  I
> really need a way to do root=label WITHOUT an initrd.  I have a portable
> USB hard drive that I boot on a variety of systems.  Sometimes root is sda,
> sometimes sdb, or even sdf.  Manually editing the root=line takes time, and
> more time is spent on figuring out where root is.  I am using grub 0.97 and
> would be willing to switch to grub 2 if it will help me.  I did try
> root=LABEL=WD320G in my menu.lst and it didn't work, (I checked the label
> of the hard drive it is WD320G).

As far as I know, the "root=" line is passed as one of the parameters to the 
booting kernel, so it shouldn't matter what version of Grub you're using.  
For instance, if you're running Linux, look at the Linux kernel documentation 
for the kernel in /Documentation/kernel-paraemeters.txt -- you'll see that 
one of the parameters the kernel takes is the "root=" parameter -- and that 
support is there regardless of you use an initrd image or not.

The label that you need to enter in "root=LABEL=" is the label on the desired 
PARTITION, not the drive's VOLUME label.  'cfdisk' can list the partition 
labels along with the device names on the disk.  For doing a double-check, 
have a look at the 'findfs' command.

  -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us