I might chime in, that I once deleted an important 90 GB partition by mistake, when a Ubuntu install had shuffled drive assignments. Ubuntu had assigned the formerly /dev/hda1 to /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda2.
Ubuntu used UUIDs. That is an approach that works, once I learned how to use it, although Ubuntu itself set up grub with a different partition assigned as "/", so I had to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf or its equivalent to even boot the system. Trouble is, who can read UUIDs? I soon abandoned Ubuntu, went back to Gentoo, in great measure because I trusted drive assignments. However, it has been pointed out that this is a kernel level issue, and there's nothing a mere user can do about it. Again, I was also told, "this is a feature not a bug." And I totally agree that anything that makes a system more confusing to set up is NOT a feature. Labels (I used gparted to define labels) allowed me to assign partitions in a more friendly way. As a convenient side effect, when I have some 15 partitions, it makes it easier to remember which is which. Alan D >
