is it necessary an initrd to boot using grub and LABELS?

[mani001]

...I'm just wondering because I have a working system with labeled partitions and everything is working fine. However, I'm buying a new hard disk and I wanted to make sure that grub keeps finding the kernel image when I add the new drive. I read some posts and it seems that for grub to work with label you need this initrd (or initramfs) thing...which I never cared about. Right now my grub.conf section for booting gentoo is just:

# For booting GNU/Linux
title Gentoo
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/sda5

So, does anyone have grub set up only knowing the label of the partition where the kernel image is...without using initrd?

Regards.

[pappy_mcfae]

As long as the old drive remains the first drive (ie master, or first SATA port) in the system, grub shouldn't notice any change in the least. The only thing you'd have to do is use /etc/fstab to mount the drive to a mount point on the main drive...and you technically wouldn't have to do that if you don't want that new hard drive to be mounted automatically.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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