[ubuntu-in] renaming / re-identifying external hard disk partitions

[ramnarayan.k at gmail.com]

Hi

i have an external hard disk, which connects (and is powered) via usb
the following is the relevant df -hT output
/dev/sdb1     ext3     92G   53G   35G  60% /media/disk
/dev/sdb2     vfat     56G  1.3G   55G   3% /media/disk-1

the problem is if it hot mount the external disk the vfat drive becomes 
disk and the ext3 disk becomes disk-1 and if i connect the USB disk 
before boot up the situation is as above.

One of the problems is that i have some lines in my sources.conf which 
point to the ext3 partition /media/disk/Ubuntu/gibbon and it does not 
help that the mount point keeps changing.

So one option i thought of was to rename one of the partitions (giving 
it a label), thus fixing how its identified, but learnt that this is a 
typical Wincedoze solution
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=561047

so there seems to be a couple of solutions

1. to fix the mount point in fstab

but would this mean every time the device is not mounted will get an error-
and do i just copy the relevant mtab section to fstab - would that work.

2. make a label for the vfat partition (under windows)
3. make a label for the ext3 partition
tried using gparted but one it does not have an option and two it seems 
like it would reformat the disk if i tried anything

is there a method to rename / label either of the paritions (vfat or 
ext3)without affecting the data inside

currently the USB disk gets automounted under /etc/mtab as follows
/dev/sdb1 /media/disk ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/disk-1 vfat 
rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0

i have tried using gnome partition editor, QTparted neither seem to give 
me the requisite tools / options.

Any suggestions

thanks
ram