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I recently reported that I am suffering random reboots. I have now |
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discovered an inconsistency in the reporting of the mount point of the |
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root directory of my Gentoo install. First a little history: |
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I spent about two and a half weeks trying to install ANYTHING that |
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would remain stable and useable. Finally Gentoo is running well. |
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Repeatedly, I was unable to understand how grub was installing the |
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MBR, or where. I had three SATA drives and one ATA drive, and I |
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removed the ATA drive to get rid of the problem of naming of drives |
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inconsistently. So far so good; however, the SATA drives are booted |
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in order that they are named in the BIOS, so I wasn't certain which |
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drive the MBR was being installed on. |
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Leaving out many details... Just when I was about to give up, I |
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discovered that if I changed the boot order, a different grub |
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appeared. One from Gentoo and one from Ubuntu. After a pitched |
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battle, I was finally able to settle on Gentoo, and it's running |
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pretty well. Except for random reboots. |
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I just noticed that the return from # df is as follows, without any |
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specific drive: designation appearing for / : |
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spineless ulod # df |
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Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on |
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rootfs 105392960 19272948 80766360 20% / |
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/dev/root 105392960 19272948 80766360 20% / |
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rc-svcdir 1024 76 948 8% /lib64/rc/init.d |
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udev 10240 212 10028 3% /dev |
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shm 1027568 0 1027568 0% /dev/shm |
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/dev/sdb6 62144164 45189664 13797732 77% /home |
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After some investigation, I found the following inconsistent |
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indentification of the / directory's physical location: |
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|
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| | / partition | |
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| where represented | 500GB HDD represented as | |
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|----------------------------+--------------------------| |
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| /boot/grub.conf "root" | (hd1,0) | |
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| /boot/grub.con kernel line | root=/dev/sda5 | |
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| /etc/fstab | /devsdb5/ | |
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| /etc/mtab | /dev/root | |
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| sfdisk -l | /dev/sda5 | |
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| /df | /dev/root | |
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| | | |
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In grub, it is located first as hd1 (/dev/sdb) and then as |
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/dev/sda5. That is where I want it to be. This is necessary |
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apparently because grub would see it on /dev/sdb at first, but once |
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the kernel boots, the drive would physically be /dev/sda. |
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|
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The identifation of this partition in /etc/fstab as /dev/sdb5, is |
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apparently not being honored? I'm asking, because I am not well |
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versed in the events in the boot order. |
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df then reports it as /dev/root, ignoring the device id. The |
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partition is seen by sfdisk as /dev/sda5, as it also is by gparted. |
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So, am I safe to rename this partition in /etc/fstab as /dev/sda5? |
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Secondly, would this help explain random reboots? |
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I now plan to simplify the arrangement, and reorganize all of the |
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active partitions on a single drive. That's another story. |
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Thank you, |
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|
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Alan |
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