Old /boot, Grub, FC3

Nick Geovanis <n-geovanis@northwestern.edu> nickgeo at merle.it.northwestern.edu
Thu Jan 26 21:05:36 UTC 2006


On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

> >>Now, you can not directly tell the system to ignore the file systems
> >>on the new drive without disabling the drive all together.
> > 
> > Disagree. I made no new entries in /etc/fstab to mount the second,
> > newly-installed drive's partitions. Therefore they should have been
> > ignored. So it seems that there are only two possibilites: (1) The 
> > correct drive was booted (channel A/ide0 master) but the wrong
> > partitions were found at mount time; or (2) The incorrect drive was 
> > booted (channel B/ide1 master) and, again, the wrong partitions were
> > selected for mounting.
> > 
> Look at /etc/fstab - are the partitions specified as
> /dev/<something>, or are you using partition labels? If you use
>  partition labels, and you have more then one partition with the
> same label, you get unpredictable results.

Actually you get very predictable results judging from the FC4 source:
You'll end-up mounting the last entry in /proc/partitions whose label
matches the label in /etc/fstab. Since /proc/partitions is (apparently)
ordered alphanumerically by device filename, I'll always get the
ide1-attached drive which has that same label. All else remaining equal, 
I should also see log messages about the duplicate labels, but the old
filesystems labelled /usr and /var were incomplete (recall FC2 and FC3
install problems for certain IDE CD-ROM drives; this older disk drive was
last used during a failed install), so I couldn't search the log files. 
Of course I'm running FC3 not FC4, so the details may differ a little.

But all's well that ends well. I just wanted to mount some old
Prolog and Python source....

> Mikkel
> 

* Nick Geovanis
| IT Computing Svcs
| Northwestern Univ
| n-geovanis@
|   northwestern.edu
+------------------->




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