With the Mint OS (an Ubuntu-derivative) using grub/grub2, you first have to identify the partition/drive using its UUID, then figure out how to state it in the fstab file.
With Mepis, all you have to to is identify the partition you want to automount (sda5, hda7, etc) in the menu.lst and it is always there, even if you resize the partition(s).
Plus when you designate a directory to share it is easily seen by other machines on the network. I still can not get Mint to share anything on the network, no matter what I do. At the most, it will ask for a username and password, but will never allow access to the folder/directory.
Still working on that, but I have no such problems with Mepis. I designate it as shared (Samba), and any other machine on the network has no problem seeing it and copying files from it.
Mepis wins, hands down.
In my experience, I have only ever needed a UUID in fstab to mount a local drive. I have never needed a UUID to mount a folder from its drive on a host machine. My fstab in that case is just:
192.168.x.x/folder_name /mount_point nfs defaults 0 0
Is one of the machines on your network a Windoze? If not, I don’t understand why you’re using Samba.