Comment 73 for bug 66637

I'm going to jump in on this. I'm seeing a different but related problem. I'm using Gutsy. I am working on bare metal restoration (http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO.html). The least intrusive way for me to perform a bare metal restoration is to provide the UUID to mkswap when I create the swap partition(s) at restoration time.

I cannot let mkswap generate the UUID and then edit fstab gracefully because fstab isn't on the disk where I can get at it at the time the restoration code deals with mkswap and the swap partitions. Also, there could be other code elsewhere that uses the old UUID.

Reading this issue, I propose that mkswap accept a UUID and use it when preparing a swap partition. That would satisfy my requirement. In addition, mkswap should generate and assign a new UUID only if:

* There is no valid UUID already on the partition, and

* The caller does not provide a UUID as an argument to mkswap.

Alternatively, is there a general purpose tool one can use to set the UUID after running mkswap?

I predict that other bare metal restoration facilities like bacula will also hit this problem.