Re: dpkg database rebuild

[Brian Kimball <bk@bk.cx>]

Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:

> Now, questions:
> 1) I use udev, so do I need to backup and restore dev ?

Sort of.  This was my one "gotcha" the first time I did this.  While 
you're still booted into your rescue disc or knoppix or whatever, make 
sure you run at least "MAKEDEV std" and "MAKEDEV console" in your 
new /dev, or your system won't be able to boot far enough for udev to 
run and mount its tmpfs over /dev.  And you may or may not need more 
depending on your setup.  I only needed std and console, mostly for 
the /dev/tty* and /dev/console entries IIRC.  YMMV.

You can use the MAKEDEV that you copied from your system; it's just a 
shell script.  Your rescue disc doesn't need to have it "installed" in 
its /sbin or anything.

> 2) I doubt if LVM and VG creation happens without the OS on the HDD.
> The metadata is stored on the partition table or is part of the OS ?
> Can someone who has experience with LVM confirm this ?
> If it was plain HDD to HDD migration, it would have been very
> trivial.

It sounds like your asking if LVM requires access to regular files on 
one of your filesystems for its metadata.  I've never used LVM, but 
from what little I know about it, I'd say probably not.  AFAIK LVM is 
an abstraction layer between the physical disc and the partitioning 
scheme.  If that's the case then there's no way it could need to rely 
on data that resides in one of the filesystems on one of the 
partitions.  No way, IMHO.  I think you're fine.

But of course you need an LVM-aware kernel.

And BTW, what does this have to do with laptops? :-)

    Brian