partition labels in installer

[valadil]

Okay, this isn't really a bug but I couldn't find a better place to make this request. Twice since May I've
accidentally blown away my home partition while trying to reinstall Ubuntu. This is a stupid user error, but its
still aggravating. I've never done this in redhat, and I've reinstalled redhat much more than ubuntu because we
use redhat where I sysadmin. I think the reason I don't make this mistake at work is because redhat's partition
utility shows labels on partitions. All that ubuntu shows is the size and filesystem. I assume you guys have a
reason why labels aren't used, so maybe someone could come up with some better way that the partition tool in the
installer could show what data is already on a drive. Labels were simply the first solution I could come up
with.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We do actually show *partition* labels, but (as far as Ubuntu is concerned) that
only works on Mac systems; standard PC partition tables don't support partition
labels. At some point we should figure out how to make partman display
*filesystem* labels if it can't find any partition labels, which would fix this bug.

[Roland Hughes (original-seasoned-geek)]

This has become a serious and most vicious bug now that Ubuntu has the SATA drive order bug where it chooses a drive sequence which differs significantly from the BIOS order. Without being able to see partition labels it is impossible to tell which drive is which when they are the same size and have one partition each. Restoring a 1TB drive from backup image is _NOT_ a pleasant experience.