In article <[🔎] 199906060324.NAA24784@nmfm_fw.nmfm.com.au> you write: >Over the past few days, I've been slowly getting my Debian system >set up, and I have a quick question about mounting. On hdc, I had >128 MB of unpartitioned space, so I decided to make it another >Linux partition and decide what to do with it later. It was the only >Linux partition on hdc, so after installation, I decided to mount it as >/lib, just so the disk wouldn't be totally idle. I mounted it as a >temporary directory, copied all the files from /lib over to it, and then >set it to mount as /lib in fstab. Now, my questions: > >1. Are the original files from the /lib directory on hda1 (my /) still >there, but just invisible because another file-system is mounted as >/lib, or are they gone? I didn't think it would be a very good idea to >delete them before mounting the new /lib, because I worried that >stuff wouldn't work very well without access to the lib files. The files in the original /lib will still exist, unless you manually deleted them. However, *don't* do this - it *will* break your computer. >2. In the future, if I decide to use my 128 MB partition on hdc for >something else, how should I go about that? Will everything break if >I unmount /lib? Yes, everything will break (for all practical purposes - see below for true technical explanation). >3. When installing Debian packages, I often see "Warning: >/lib/somethingorother.2 is not a symlink". Is this because /lib is >mounted on a different filesystem? Are there any consequences of >this warning, or is it harmless? I suspect this may be an unrelated bug in the package. I have seen similar warnings myself, but do not have /lib mounted on a separate partition. >4. Was mounting /lib on a different filesystem a completely dumb >idea to begin with? What's something else I could put on my 128MB >filesystem? Now for the bad news - mounting /lib on another partition will not work (someone please tell me if I am wrong) because the libraries in it are required for booting the computer, and before partitions other then the root partition have been mounted. If you can find a to boot up to the point where /lib is mounted, everything should be OK.... So to answer your question above, "will unmounting /lib break your system?" the correct technical answer is that, no it won't break your system if it is already running, because the computer still will be using the old copy of the libraries for critical functions (eg /sbin/init). However, I don't think this is the answer you were looking for. If this doesn't make sense to you, don't worry about it. However, deleting the old copies of the libraries, will break your system, and won't be able to boot again. A better approach would be to do the same thing for /usr, as /usr is not required for boot. However, have a rescue disk handy in case you do anything wrong and can no longer boot. Others should be able to point out step-by-step instructions to prevent accidently hosing your computer. However, it looks like you have already done a significant part of the job yourself for /lib. You didn't say how you copied the files though - make you you preserve the file permissions when you do so. "cp -a" will do the right thing and recurse into subdirectories. >Thanks for any help. I'm going to boot back into Debian & wrestle >with X more & try to figure out why pine isn't working. Good day. I much prefer mutt to pine ;-) -- Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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