Changing disk UUID after cloning in CentOS 6

Question

I have a CentOS 6 system, and I want to make several clones of it. I'm using Clonezilla to clone the drives; that's no problem. But the drive UUIDs are driving me up the wall. After cloning, the two drives have the same UUID, but I'd like each clone to have different UUIDs so there's no possibility of a conflict when I am running diagnostics with two drives installed, etc. But when I change the UUID of the /boot or / partition (even if I update /etc/fstab), the system won't boot; it GRUBs OK (after I use recovery mode to rerun grub-install), but never gets to the 'Welcome to CentOS " message. Do I need to "rebless" vmlinuz or initrd or initramfs in the /boot partition if I change the drive UUID?

Or should I just ignore UUID and go back to using labels in /etc/fstab (which is what I did in CentOS 5)?

Answer 1

*If the disk is in /dev/sda2 then generate a new UUID with uuidgen and apply it with tune2fs

myhost # uuidgen
b13fddae-a3c3-4d17-8220-7773eb404dec
myhost # tune2fs -U b13fddae-a3c3-4d17-8220-7773eb404dec /dev/sda2

Answer 2

I hate UUIDs. There is *no* way you can remember them, when you're sitting at a console trying to bring something up. We stayed with labels, which always work, and are easy to change.