[NMLUG] Disk-to-disk copying and booting

[ebrown at lanl.gov (Ed Brown)]

Right, remove entries, if they exist, for the backup disks (sdb, sdc). 
(You might not even have any, since you mentioned you are just copying
from sda to sdb with dd.)

And referring to your original letter, I might guess that the rest of
/etc/fstab includes lines like:
LABEL=/		/	ext3 	defaults	1 1
LABEL=/boot	/boot	ext3	defaults	1 2

Run 'mount', to see what partitions are mounted where, and change the
LABEL entries accordingly, to something like:

/dev/sda2	/ 	ext3 	...
/dev/sda1	/boot	ext3	...

You can also use the e2label command to verify labels:  "e2label
/dev/sda1' will tell you what the label is on that partition.  

Now the OS will no longer scan all the disks for certain LABELs (and get
confused when it finds two or three duplicates).  It will only try to
mount the first scsi disk, whatever disk it is you have plugged in that
slot.  Be sure your backup disks include this modified /etc/fstab.  

-Ed 



On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 08:48, Aaron Birenboim wrote:
> Matthew McCleary wrote:
> > No; in fact, if I'm absent-minded I tend to forget to remove the
> > backup drive from the server after the backup is completed. If someone
> > else reboots the machine (this is a development server, and multiple
> > people tend to use it and reboot it), I don't want the partitions on
> > the backup drive to be mounted.
> > 
> > So we're thinking I should edit the /etc/fstab?
> 
> yea.  that seems to be ab elegant solution.
> either remove fstab entries for the backup disks entirely,
> or at least put the noauto option on there.
> 
> I can't see why that wouldn't work.