Adding existing Fedora drives to new install

[Bob McClure Jr]

On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 12:24:30PM -0700, Bret Stern wrote:
> 
> I've had to re-install Fedora 5 on some new
> scsi drives.
> 
> But I need to get some data off of the previous
> scsi drives.
> 
> Can I install the old drives and temporarily
> mount them to get the data?

If you mean in place of the new drive(s), yes, that's trivial.  If you
mean in addition to the new drives, yes, it's easy, with a few
caveats.

> Is this possible?

Check your /etc/fstab.  If it has entries that look like

LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2

instead of

/dev/sda1               /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2

and the old drives also have mounts by labels in their /etc/fstab, it
will have a problem upon booting figuring out which partition with a
/boot label to mount on /boot.

On your new, operational disks change the labels to real device names
(run "df" to find out what they are), then shut down, install the old
drive(s), and reboot.  When you temporarily mount the old partitions,
create a scratch mount point (directory) such as /oldstuff, and use
device names, not labels, when you do the mounts.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
bob at bobcatos.com             http://www.bobcatos.com
"Where you go in the hereafter depends on what you were after here."
  - Thanks to Graffiti, 2 March 2004