Works well to mount logical volumes by path, since the mount always stays the same.
For regular partitions however, this may not always be the case.
The path of the disk depends on when and where the OS sees the drive.
For example, 4 USB drives are plugged in, they are assigned a certain order when the host boots up.
In this case the first one is Drive 1 /dev/sda, Drive 2 /dev/sdb, Drive 3 /dev/sdc, Drive 4 /dev/sdd and so on.
However, if you unplug Drive 2, the old /dev/sdc becomes /sdb and the old /sdd becomes /sdc.
If the drive path changes and /etc/fstab has a line to mount the drive, it freezes the boot process.
It is better to mount the drives based on a label, for example LABEL=backup OR UUID=<insert UUID> and then the mount point on the machine.
Example of mounting a drive based on UUID or Labels:
Create two additional partitions on the logical drive /dev/vdb
sudo gdisk /dev/vdb
n for new partition, default settings. First sector is default and Last sector is +250M. Select the default partition type.
Do the same as the above for the other partition.
p to print the partition table.
The Kernel will still use the old partition table, can verify with cat /proc/partitions
If the new partitions are not listed, can run sudo partprobe to make the Kernel aware of the new partitions.
If that still doesn’t fix it, then reboot.
Sometimes the drive can become locked and the Kernel cannot update the live partition table.
Usually, this is due to a drive being mounted.
In that case, unmount the drive and run partprobe again.
Next, format the partitions as ext4 with sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/vdb2 , same for sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/vdb3 as well.
Then check with sudo blkid, see both partitions are formatted as ext4.
Then create the mount point with sudo mkdir /media/vdb2 and do the same for vdb3.
One partition will be mounted by UUID. The other partition will be mounted by a label.
Can find the UUID for the drive via sudo blkid.
Then edit /etc/fstab and add UUID=ID_HERE /media/vdb2 ext4 defaults 0 0
0 0 is dump and restore.
The other partition we can set a label on the file system and mount it by label.
File System label are file system specific.
These are file system specific as well.
Since we are using ext4, we can set the file system label with the e2label command.
If it was formatted with xfs, we would use the xfs_admin command.
sudo e2label /dev/vdb3 backups
Can then verify the label it is given afterwards with sudo e2label /dev/vdb3
It will then say backups
If you want more information about the filesystem, use sudo tune2fs -l /dev/vdb3 , the scroll up and you will see the Filesystem volume name as backups
Once the label is set, edit fstab again.
Then add LABEL=backups /media/vdb3 ext4 defaults 0 0
To verify the lines in fstab work do sudo mount -a and any errors, then change the fstab entries.