Okay Jayce a couple last thoughts and I will leave you alone for a little while and get lost in the world of Google.
Hahah, no worries!
1. Anyway to re-label a partition? You have seen how all my newly formatted EXT4 partitions all go by the UUID. while that is great as there cant be any confusion, I honestly prefer simple names to UUID and would like to rename the partitions to Pics/Docs/Music and so forth for what I have stored on them. To make life easier on myself.
1a. If not possible to just relabel them, I will just transfer the data to the 1TB drive and reformat. No big deal. Just hoping for an easier solution.
You can re-label them with either GParted or Disk Utility. GParted is that program I use when I really need to get into the nitty gritty of partitioning or setting up disks. For everything else, Disk Utility does a great job. I see your edit indicating you figured it out, but just keep Disk Utility in mind. I often check Disk Utility just to see how things are doing. I particularly like the SMART data reporting in there.
2. After I do the above, is there anyway to re-mount the /home/pictures folder to said drive? I know that you said it could be done during the install process. I just would not check the format option and the information would be there but I could use the mount point of /home for a drive again so when I reinstalled it would only redo the / partition. So I am wondering if it is possible to remount the personal folders to new locations to reflect where I have that data already stored to save myself hassle.
Pretty much building on what you said previously that you could have 20 partitions on all the drives and no one would know cause you would just mount a different aspect to each drive. Can this possibly be done after the install?
If not that might be the main reason why I have another shot at a reinstall of Ubuntu. So I can remap these things with ease and save myself a ton of time and trouble from having to keep backups in different places. This would allow me to create just 1 backup drive for all of my stuff instead of having it all split up like I have been doing with Windows for all these years.
Well, I suppose you could. You see, doing it during the installation process makes it easier, sure, but it's certainly not impossible to flip things around after the fact - it's you have to edit /etc/fstab somehow, whether manually or the storage management GUI you came across. Maybe somebody else can jump in, but IN THEORY, you should be able to mount a specific hard drive/partition to /home/joker/Pictures just fine. After all, what's the difference between /home/joker and /home/joker/Pictures? I see no difference there. The drive/partition has its own UUID, so it should be mountable. I would have to *assume* it might look something like:
UUID=100100100100100 /home/joker EXT4 defaults 0 2
UUID=200200200200200 /home/joker/Music EXT4 defaults 0 2
UUID=300300300300300 /home/joker/Pictures EXT4 defaults 0 2
That's just me assuming, but I really don't see anything wrong with that. I hate messing with mount points with sensitive data though, so at least keep in the back of your mind what you're doing so you can reverse it in case an issue comes up. The only reason I say that is let's say /home/joker/Pictures exists with 100 pictures, but you mount drive B as /home/joker/Pictures. Where do those 100 originals go when you mount your Pictures folder on top of it? I personally don't know... this calls for a little experiment... I'm just trying to play it super safe because I don't want to give out advice that backfires.
*Edit*
Well I figured out how to rename the partitions so that they now use name labels instead of UUID. So that is a plus for me. Makes life much more simple for me on that end. Now I just have to figure out how to mount those folders to those locations to save myself even more time.
Just to recap, what are you doing exactly that you want the drive labels over UUID? You WANT the UUID for /etc/fstab. There's nothing better and more pinpointed than the UUID's being listed in /etc/fstab when firing the system up. Now, let's say you're talking about your misc drives that aren't in /etc/fstab and you want them to have names, oh yes, drive labels will rock your world there.
I just want to make sure the fundamental differences of UUID and drive labels are understood. Drive labels are only for the user, but do little/nothing for the system. UUID differentiation is heavenly when it comes to the system knowing what's what, where, why, how, etc.
Hope this helps!
At any rate, as long as it predictably comes up with the proper drive assignments from here on out (via GParted, etc) it may be one of those situations to choke up as "Hey, it works, back away slowly."
