[PLUG] I should have known better

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 03:27:51 -0700
Eric Wilhelm <scratchcomputing at gmail.com> dijo:

> # from John Jason Jordan
> # on Saturday 17 June 2006 05:21 pm:
> 
> >OK, right now I have no idea what is going on. All I know is that my
> >old Breezy is running, Sylpheed finds all my mail folders and address
> >books, Firefox comes up with all my bookmarks; everything is as it
> > was. Is there a new 8 GB partition out there somewhere? 

> could be that your chroot dir was actually a mount of your old files?
> 
> "fdisk -l" to list the partitions.  Maybe also take a peek 
> at /etc/fstab.  Both have manpages too.

OK, fdisk -l shows:

jjj at Devil5:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Password:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot     Start   End          Blocks    Id   System
/dev/hda1            1      125      1004031   82  Linux swap / Solaris 
/dev/hda2          126   7421   58605120   83  Linux
/dev/hda3         7422  8441     8193150   83  Linux

So there it is. Exactly as it is supposed to be.

The mystery is why, when booting the new Dapper, it showed all my old
files. There are two possibilities, as far as I can figure. 1) The new
Dapper mounted my Breezy /dev/hda2 somewhere, and the blond boy got
confused and wandered into it by mistake, thus thinking Dapper had been
installed over the old Breezy installation or, 2) the messed up inodes
were the culprit and I'm not as blond as I seem. It would make me feel
much better if it turns out to be (2). I offer only one fact in support
of (2): I booted all five possibilities (two Dapper, three Breezy) and
each time I got Dapper, and I'm pretty sure each time all my files were
there, and each time I got the "fsck needed" warning and used Ctrl-D to
ignore it and boot anyway. It was AFTER I finally let it fix the
filesystem problems, which it said were messed up inodes, that booting
one of the Breezy options worked properly. I haven't tried anything since.

Besides getting messed up, what do inodes do?