Re: Shuffling drives

[Phil Brutsche <pbrutsch@creighton.edu>]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> I've got a system with Win98 installed on /dev/hda1 and Linux on
> /dev/hdb1. I'm planning to wipe the Win98 partition (when the Linux
> install has 2 months of uptime, you tend to suspect that dual-boot
> isn't needed) and considering swapping the drives so the system is
> booting Linux from /dev/hda.
> 
> If I'm just changing the jumpers on the drives and not moving Linux to
> a different physical drive, should I be OK with just updating LILO and
> fstab to reflect the change?  Or are there other places that will need
> to be updated as well?

Well, this is the procedure I used a couple months ago:

1) put an available floppy in the floppy drive
2) dd if=<your kernel image> of=/dev/fd0
3) rdev /dev/fd0 <your new root device>
4) shut down the computer
5) fiddle with the hardware
6) boot the computer back up using the floppy disk you just made
7) once Linux has booted, make the changes to /etc/lilo.conf and
   /etc/fstab so that things will work right without the floppy
8) do a test boot to make sure you got things right - make sure you have
   that floppy you made handy in case you did something wrong

I use steps 1-3 since I tend to have a basically stock slink install with
various security and y2k updates installed, but tend to compile my own
kernels.  If you haven't messed with that at all, you can use the Debian
rescue floppy (or boot from the CD, if your computer can do that) and type
in 'rescue root=<your new root device>' at the appropriate prompt.

So, basically, yea you just update LILO and fstab :)

-- 
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Phil Brutsche					pbrutsch@creighton.edu

"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein