Q: using partition labels instead of IDs in Grub menu entries?

[Don Kennedy]

Hi, all. I looked over the FAQ and mailing list archives and didn't see the 
following question; sorry if it was covered elsewhere:

In Linux (at least, perhaps in other OSs), one can specify a partition in the 
/etc/fstab file via its partition label instead of its numeric ID. I first 
saw this used in Red Hat Linux 7.3. It seemed a useful technique for 
referring to partitions in a position-independent manner, but not as useful 
if the bootloader didn't also do the same thing. Reading over the Grub info 
pages, I didn't see any indication of being able to refer to a Grub root 
partition as "LABEL=RH73SYS" or some such instead of (hd0,6). I'm sure this 
idea must have been considered by Grub's developers, and I'm curious why this 
isn't an option - I suspect it relates to the different ways such labels 
would be represented on different OSs, but I'd rather get my info from 
reliable sources.

Thanks,

Don Kennedy