GRUB errors, contd

The problems in resizing with Qtparted began showing up in different ways. This time I end up with just a grub command prompt. No more Error 18 message.
In the mean time I tried a few modifications to the jinxed OpenSuse installation. I used the sabayon live Cd to re-resize the NTFS partition, then I reduced the size of the extended partition which was covering the rest of the drive to make space for another primary drive to hold the swap and boot ext2 partitions. Here too the Sabayon installation proceeded smoothly, but after a reboot I do not get any errors, just the Grub command prompt.

I tried using the drive on another system. This time I got the boot menu, which surprised me a lot. I was just begining to think that the previous mobo was to blame and not GRUB or Linux, when the booting process stopped with an error that the root drive was not valid. The boot progress could be seen from the display, and one word seemed interesting - mtab. Rhymes with fstab. A google search showed that mtab is automatically created and hence editing it is not worthwhile. Editing fstab seemed like the logical next step.

Opening up fstab, I was introduced to yet another system of naming drives. This one goes one step beyond the one seen so far in making life for the ordinary user difficult. While the naming scheme involving sdx or hdx which could label a disk based on its location in the channel was idiotic, this one was downright incomprehensible. When a partition on the drive is labelled "/dev/disk/by-uuid/f7a69855-d98a-448b-9347-0688aa548dc3" it is impossible to tell which partition is being referred to. Atleast "hda5" made some sense.
Seems distros like Opensuse and Sabayon revel in aggravating a user, since I have seen a similar notation in OPensuse menu as well. I wonder if UUID is the same for a hard disk irrespective of the motherboard it is plugged into, or is it a random figure.
The fstab entry is reflected in the menu.lst file in GRUB as well. In Sabayon's Boot folder, I discovered another thing - that menu.lst is a short cut to grub.conf file. Is this only in Sabayon's case?

Replacing the UUID gibberish with the more sensible hdax notation seemed to improve matters, a lot. With the modified menu.lst, Sabayon booted right into the command prompt. As previously experienced, the shift in systems only caused a hiccup in X. fstab still contains the UUID notation, but it didn't cause a problem during boot.