[PLUG] hey, you really _should_ reboot after repartitioning!

[Russell Senior]

I was upgrading harddisks in my mail server last night.  I used cfdisk
and partitioned into three hda1, hda2, hda3, got the usual warning
about rebooting, which I usually ignore without damage.  hda2 was
intended for swap, hda3 as /aux where I was planning to plant /home.
I mke2fs'd hda3, copied a swath of home directories from hda1 to hda3.
This seemed to go fine, so I nuked the source home from hda1.  Then I
remembered to create the swap with "mkswap /dev/hda2".  I saw an
annoyingly large swapsize (like 20gig or something I never quite
parsed, a 2 followed by an unnerving and obviously erroneous number of
additional digits).

I rebooted and after a short interval discovered that I couldn't
slogin to the machine.  No home directory.  Oops.  The hda3 filesyste
hadn't been mounted.  Tried to mount.  Toast.  Luckily, I had the old
disk intact, so it was just another copy from it to the new /home
tree, however I did lose about an hour of mail deliveries.  Checking
/var/log/mail.log, it only amounted to a couple of messages to
mostly-unread mailing lists and a pile of spam, so not too much
damage.

Remember the non-printing [pause] and [think] characters after "rm -rf"!

... and remember to reboot after repartitioning! ;-)

-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com