Ext2/Ext3 partition label abuse

[Boszormenyi Zoltan <zboszor@mail.externet.hu>]

Hi!

I have a RedHat 7.2 machine installed from scratch.
Recently I installed RedHat 7.2 on another machine
that has two harddisks (/dev/hda and /dev/hdc)
The second is in a removable bay.
Linux was installed on /dev/hdc.

My main machine also has a hdd bay (/dev/hdc) and I have
put the new machine's removable hdd into the main one
and booted up. (I had to copy some files and no network
between the machines.)

On boot I had strange errors that said that this and that
partitions cannot be found. I observed the following.

The / partition contains the main machine's data from /dev/hda2
although the mount command lists / as mounted from /dev/hdcX.
Every other partitions are mounted from /dev/hdc.

The problem is that /etc/fstab as used by RedHat, lists the partition
by LABEL=/mountpoint which labels can be found on both
/dev/hda and /dev/hdc.

The /proc/partitions "file" lists the partitions in disk-reversed order,
e.g.:

/dev/hdc1  ....
...
/dev/hdc10 ...
/dev/hda1 ...
...
/dev/hda9 ...

Is there a way to fix this? Yes there is: vendors should not use
LABEL=XXX method in /etc/fstab. Either use the proper
device/partition or the UUID. The downside is that fsck messages
would not be as pretty-printed as now. Or maybe the partitions
should not be registered in disk-reversed order...

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi