[uug] Mounting by volume label

[Adam Augustine]

I am having some trouble mounting a partition by its volume label. This 
is on an apparently stock (with current "up2date -u" updates) Red Hat 9 
machine.

I plugged in a USB hard drive, partitioned it (fdisk /dev/sda1, d, n, 
w), created a reiser filesystem (mkfs.reiserfs /dev/sda1), mounted it 
(mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/offsite), played with it a bit creating and 
deleting files, unmounted it (umount /mnt/offsite), then added a volume 
label (reiserfstune --label "offsite"), and tried to mount it with the 
label (mount -L "offsite" /mnt/offsite). To which Linux responds:

mount: no such partition found

I have googled around a bit and found that people with this problem 
generally are having it when changing kernels (with CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=y) 
and not mounting devfs at /dev 
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2002/debian-user-200205/msg04335.html 
is an example).

Based on what is in /proc/partitions and /usr/src/linux-2.4/configs I am 
assuming devfs was not compiled into the kernel (is there an easy way to 
tell what options a kernel actually has turned on, short of looking in 
/usr/src/linux/configs which only tells what it /might/ have been 
compiled with?) so I am at something of a loss as to where to look next. 
There is nothing in the syslog files that I can see that would provide 
additional information, unless I am not looking for the right things.

One thing I did notice is that /proc/partitions does not remove the 
entries for /dev/sda1 when the drive is unplugged. I know "mount -L" 
uses /proc/partitions to search for volume labels, but it doesn't list 
the labels themselves (AFAIK).

Any ideas?

	Adam Augustine

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