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Linux Skills Test

Copyright 2004 A.P. Lawrence

Answer

Maybe

If you have IDE drives, you won't need to adjust fstab for other drives.

If you have SCSI drives, it depends upon which drive you removed and how you identified it in fstab. Linux assigns /dev/sda to the first SCSI drive it sees, sdb to the second, and so on. If you remove the drive that was sdb, the drive that was sdc will now become sdb, and you will need to edit fstab if you reference /dev/sdb there. If you used labels instead of device names, no change is necessary.

See "man fstab"

Comments /Tests/Linux/e0836.html

 TestsLinuxq0836 : 
-September 15, 2004 Of course

if you are using LVM, you would not be changing the

fstab file at all. 
-November 25, 2004


Wed Mar 30 15:31:03 2005 mounts on sub mount-points  anonymous

If any other drives/partitions were mounted on points below the removed
drive, you'll have to mount them in a legit place now.



Thus, if you have

bash> mount

/dev/hda2 on /mnt/one

/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/one/path/to/dir



removing hda2 will require you to remount hdb1 on a valid location


Fri Jun 17 05:33:50 2005 Removing IDE Drive  JesseLong

If hdd is set to "cable select" and you remove hdc, hdd will become hdc
and you will have to update fstab


Sat Jan 21 02:45:23 2006 Not how ATA cable select works  anonymous

What? That's not what a 'cable select' cable does. It doesn't move a slave
to a master just because you don't have a master. That only happens if you
move the drive from the middle to the end of the cable.

I do note that some IDE interfaces seem to have difficulty with a slave-and-no-master,
and that's explicitly unsupported.


Mon Apr 2 00:13:15 2007   k8to

This is a telling question, but it will soon be drifting out of date as
libata grows in popularity. Already my SATA devices show up as 'sda' and
may shift if I add and remove devices.


Mon Aug 18 08:29:50 2008   Wesly

Website:
For ext2 and ext3 filesystem, e2label can avoid the modification on /etc/fstab.


Because it reads the label on each labeled partition instead of device
path.


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