Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
My Debian Stretch system has three HD's. I want to remove one of the HD's
(not sda) and replace it with a new HD..
What I need to be sure of is, if I remove the old drive from the fstab and
delete the mount point will the system boot after I put in the new HD. so
that I can edit the fstab and create a mount point for the new drive?
Hence, the request for the sanity check.
The system needs the following to boot:
- the BIOS or UEFI needs to know which drive has a boot loader.
- that drive needs a boot loader (usually grub)
- the boot loader needs to know where to load the kernel and
possibly an init filesystem from
- the kernel needs to be able to mount /, the root partition.
Typically, all of those things will be on one drive, and that's
usually /dev/sda. However, it's possibly to change all of them.
You're probably safe. If you want to be sure, run a test:
- shutdown to power off
- unplug power from the drive you're going to replace
- try to boot
If that succeeds, shut down again and go ahead with the
replacement. If it fails, you need to trace the boot process
above and find out what's on the drive you're replacing,
and arrange for that to be changed or copied.
-dsr-