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

Derek Loree drl at drloree.com
Tue Dec 30 21:55:02 UTC 2003


On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 14:05, Russell Senior wrote:
> 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.

Most install programs do this too, but I have found it to be necessary
to reboot before creating any file systems on a repartitioned disk.  Was
this a freshly created partition table, or was the drive already
partitioned?

>   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).

Ouch, the times I've been bitten have usually been when changing from
the M$ version to the linux version.
> 
> 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"!

Aren't you supposed to remember them before "rm -rf"?
> 
> ... and remember to reboot after repartitioning! ;-)

Good advice.

Derek Loree






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