During 8.10 text installation, How can I identify which sda? partition was my root partition

Try: fdisk -l

You can also use a live CD and use Partition Editor (System, Administration).

To be specific, for sda1 use: sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda1

You might not have seen that I can switch to console via ALT+F2 and run fdisk -l. But the information presented for each partitio is the device eg /dev/sda10, the cyclinders start and End, the Block size, and the ID and system type. All of my Linux partitions are type 83 - there is no label identifying whether a partition is root, home, var, and so on.

From the ALT+F2 console, running cat /etc/fstab did not give this same information (because this would correspond to the installation cd information)

My solution to this is to
1) Use trial and error and simply select each partition in turn to be root until a shell can be loaded from the partition. In my case I successively selected 3 partitions of which the first 2 failed to load a shell, but the third succeeded.

2) From the shell I could see by running ls that indeed this was my root directory. I then ran cat /etc/fstab and could see my partition labels and their corresponding UUID.

I can guess that your suggestion of using Partition Editor would work, but I thought there would be a command tool or file that I could use to get to the information held in fstab (located relative to my true root /etc/fstab, not the cd /root) from the ALT+F2 console.

Andre, Thank you very much. I will remember those identifiers. However, from ALT+F2 loaded via the alternate installation cd, I cannot run grub (/bin/sh: grub: not found).

I instead managed to mount the root by trialling different partitions until I could see the correct directories under root.
mount /dev/sd10 /mnt did the trick.

After mount /dev/sda10 /mnt, I can see vmlinuz. Also, Running df -h shows me where each /dev/sdaX is mounted on.

Thanks again

Thanks Andre Mangan, that solved my question.