Quoting Jim Jackson (jj@???):

> My detachable backups devices have unique partitions labels and I place a
> specifically named file in the root of the partition. My backup scripts
> check for both and give up if they can't find both. THEN I do the dmesg
> thing :-)

Both really good ideas.

I'm also reminded, by your mention of partition labels, of a real
stumper of a problem that was described many years ago on the Silicon
Valley Linux User Group mailing list: A Linux host kernel panicked and
fell over any time a particular hard drive was physically attached to it
during boot up, but the hard drive was well behaved and had normal,
apparently valid Linux filesystems on it, as viewed on other Linux
hosts or using a live CD distro.

The solution was that the afflicted host had a partition with label of,
say, USR_PART, and the seemingly problematic hard drive also had one
with the identical label string. The booting kernel got confused and
died because of the ambiguity, when it tried to parse and implement
/etc/fstab.

You did, of course, say _unique_ partition labels, which avoids that
gentleman's quite perplexing problem.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen            Diaeresis:  Keeping the cow out of co-worker since 700 AD.
rick@???    
McQ! (4x80)