UUID in /etc/fstab

I was confused the other day, while working to move my ubuntu installation to LVM, about drive entries in /etc/fstab. Instead of the standard /dev/hdx# format, the listings were using a string of random characters labeled UUID. Upon further inspection it would seem that this is a change brought about by udev in more recent linux distributions. To discover the id of a volume from its device name try reading the man page for "vol_id". In short, as root (sudo!), execute `sudo vol_id /dev/sdb1`. In my case sdb1 is the second sata drive. If you use IDE it would likely be hdx#, where x is the drive letter (a for first, b for second) and the partition on that drive. You can get drive number listings by using `sudo fdisk -l` (a lowercase L for "list".)