Mounting Disks using Disk Label

[Guest Plisgyn]

I have several hard disks in caddies which plug into one receptacle in my PC, the disks are Vfat and ext2/ext3. What I need

to do is be able to supermount each disk to a different mount point depending on the disk label. My first problem is to label the

disks, in MLCC Mount Points I can add a Label to the fstab entry but how do I write a label to the disk it self. Any help will be

gratefully received.

 

Phil Jones

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[ianw1974]

With ext2/ext3 partitions you can use the:

 

e2label

 

command. Not sure about writing labels to FAT32.

[Guest Plisgyn]

Thanks I have now labeled my ext2/ext3 disks and my Vfat disk shows a label in Windows but not in Linux, I think this is because

the label is i.e in hdc rather than hdc1. I still have the problem getting the system to mount the removeable disk on different mount

points according to label.

 

Phil Jones

Edited December 4, 2006 by Plisgyn

[ianw1974]

Any particular reason why you want to mount by label, rather than the partition information?

 

I've still been trying to figure out what benefits it has mounting via label, than /dev/hdax or whatever :P

 

I honestly think it'd be better to mount by the partition, for example:

 

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/fatpartition

 

assuming hda1 is the partition of course, just an example. /etc/fstab can be edited accordingly with this information to auto-mount where necessary.

[Guest Plisgyn]

The problem is a I have several disks ext2/3 and vfat in caddies, and when any disk is plugged in to my sole PC receptacle

they are all seen as as hde1. This is why I need labels unless you know another way I can mount different disks on various

mount points.

[emmanuel_uk]

-L label

Mount the partition that has the specified label.

-U uuid

Mount the partition that has the specified uuid. These two options require the file /proc/partitions (present since Linux 2.1.116) to exist.

[ianw1974]

As I mentioned, ext2/ext3 can be mounted by label. I've also just checked, and you cannot mount vfat/Fat32 partitions by label.

 

The command in Linux for creating labels on DOS type partitions, or FAT/FAT32/VFAT if you like is:

 

mlabel

 

do:

 

man mlabel

 

to read up on it. However, when reading the man page for mount command, it can only mount by label for ext2/ext3 and xfs. Maybe even reiserfs too, but definitely not vfat type partitions.

[emmanuel_uk]

Is uuid a linux thing only? I do not do windows, so do not know

At boot time in mdv both label and uuid are displayed.

 

I suppose for the vfat, a bit of scripting might do the trick

Say once it is mounted on default mountpoint a script

looks at the label and mount the HD on another location...

 

I believe uuid are unique, but label not necessarily

[Guest Rick]

I have a usb thumbdrive that is labeled. I'm able to mount it by label by having the following line in my /etc/fstab.

 

/dev/disk/by-label/THUMBDRIVE /mnt/thumbdrive vfat noauto,umask=0,user 0 0

 

I don't know why that wouldn't work with the mount command directly. Give it a shot...