Re: Swapping Drives - Sanity Check
On Fri 22 Feb 2019 at 09:19:53 (-0500), Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
> On 02/22/2019 09:13 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> The OS is on dev/sda. The disk I changing is /dev/sdc
I think we're assuming that you have something better than
/dev/sdaX in your /etc/fstab, UUIDs or LABELs. With modern
PCs, you can be surprised by how these device names are
assigned.
Cheers,
David.
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