Comment 5 for bug 480147

Thanks for posting this -- it just hit me, exactly as it did you.

I was going into fstab to learn to permanently mount an ntfs partition at boot, and was trying to make sense of the uuid values. I read the note above, and thought "Cool. I'll use the uuid instead of the device id..."

This installation was an upgrade into Karmic from Jaunty.

I gave it a whirl and came up with:
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ vol_id --uuid
vol_id: command not found
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ volid --help
volid: command not found

the text on fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).

A google search led me to this bug. Unfortunately even between the man pages, and --help, I can't quite figure out how to acquire the UUID of my partition at /dev/sda1. blkid keeps exiting without printing anything.

Upon using blkid -U [uuid of one of the mounted partitions ref'd in fstab] I get the device name, /dev/sdb1
I can't figure out how to obtain the UUID, and instructions on using the command should be included as it was pre-karmic for vol_id --uuid.

ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ blkid -U 251b85ad-9f35-49d3-9b4d-0bd76c70d51e
/dev/sdb1
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ blkid -L /dev/sdb1
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ blkid /dev/sdb1
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ blkid /dev/sdb1
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ blkid /dev/sda1
ttilberg@ragnarok:~$ ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc /dev/sde
/dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb5 /dev/sdd /dev/sdf

This was about to be a cool thing, but the documentation needs to be fixed for upgraded users.
Thanks,
Tim