Mounting disks by label in Linux

USB hard disks are often allocated different device names by Linux each time the system boots. For example: what is currently recognized as /dev/sda1 may well end up being /dev/sdb1 after a reboot. To get round this, it is possible to mount disks by label rather than device name by taking the following steps (as root):

First of all, you need to see if the partition in question already has a label:

e2label /dev/sda1

(assuming the device is currently recognised as sda1)

To (re)set the disk’s label do:

e2label /dev/sda1 thelabel

Reboot your system:

reboot

Edit /etc/fstab:

LABEL=thelabel /mnt/point auto defaults 0 2

Remount everything in the fstab file:

mount -a

The disk will now be accessible at the same mount point each time the system boots regardless of what device name (sda,sdb etc) it is allocated by the operating system.