Running Fedora 17, you expect certain features to be a bit ‘bleeding edge’, but sometimes it seems things are getting more difficult, rather than – as it should be – easier?
An example in point.. Why on earth did someone decide good old eth0 was not good enough?  Now I have ‘p20p1‘ instead!

I used to think adding a disk drive to the system was a no-brainer, and now they have changed fstab to use those heiroglyphic UUIDs..

So, instead of /dev/sda1…, or even LABEL=SDA1…., we have UUID=eft456-fgt7y-6756….etc..

As I am always running out of disk space (and shooting HD video does eat up the bytes…) I had to add another disk..    The last time I did this, I used LABEL=SDxn…, but now fstab is all UUIDs..   So, for those who face a similar conundrum, this is how I did it:

Format the disk the usual fdisk way…  Create the filesystem on it (I am still using ext3..) the usual way.
The system will then ‘automagically’ assign the UUID to the disk, even though it isn’t mounted yet..  # dmesg will show you the device id in /dev, after you have created the filesystem..

To add the appropriate entry to fstab, just do
# ll /dev/disk/by-uuid |grep sdxn – where sdxn is the new disk you want to add..
On my system, I got:
# ll /dev/disk/by-uuid |grep sdh1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 11 09:53 ec4df8fb-19df-4cf8-af1f-2bc47f765fa6 -> ../../sdh1
(FYI, this isn’t the real UUID!)
Now, you just have to add the necessary details to /etc/fstab, and cut/paste the UUID..   In my case, I added:

UUID=ec4df8fb-19df-4cf8-af1f-2bc47f765fa6         /data8    ext3    defaults   1 2

You – of course – will need to use whatever mount point and filesystem you need..

And then (as root) just # mount /data8,  and the disk is ready – to start filling up with yet more valuable ‘data’….