On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:20:34 -0700
MJang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo:

> At last night's meeting, I tried helping John get his system
> from /dev/hda3 to /dev/hda2. I think I should have told him to 
> 
> cp -arf / /media/hda2
> 
> (with some sort of excludes for /proc and /media, or maybe followed by 
> a 
> 
> rm -rf /media/hda2/media/hda2         
> 
> /dev/hda2 is 60G, /dev/hda3 is 8GB)
> But instead, I told him to 
> 
> rsync -aHv --exclude /proc --exclude /media / /media/hda2
> 
> I think the -H screwed his system a bit, during the boot process,
> there's some error message related to the lrm-manager
> and /lib/modules/somekernelversiondir. 
> 
> (John, what was the message?)

The command we used (which I saved to my CheatSheet file with gedit)
was:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sudo rsync -aHv --exclude=/proc
--exclude=/media / /media/hda2/

That was actually the second attempt. We halted the first attempt and
added exclude=/media because I had a USB disk mounted and had forgotten
to unmount it before running the command. Plus, the partition we were
rsyncing to (hda2) was also mounted. In fact, I had used rsync before
and knew that rsync is smart enough not to copy hda2 to itself over and
over, but we excluded it anyway.

> command from that point leads to a normal boot. Well sort of. Since the
> -H was added, there's a hard link between some files; what we saw before
> we left was the same inode in the /etc/fstab in both partitions.

As Mike said, the computer boots normally, except that during the boot
process I get dumped to a command line with a page full of error
messages, all relating to mounting lrm. I wrote down the last line of
the error messages:

lrm on /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-amd64-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw)

We quickly discovered that if I hit enter, then type exit and enter
again, it proceeds to boot my Ubuntu Dapper-64 normally. (But more
below.)

To keep people from getting confused, hda1 is a 1 GB swap, hda2 is 60
GB that I want to become my main boot system, and hda3 is an 8 GB
partition holding my current "real" system. Others have suggested that
I just reinstall Dapper on the 60 GB partition, however it would take
me a month to get a new installation configured the way I want it. Some
of the things I did I can't even remember how I did them, e.g., getting
Gnome not to display icons on the desktop. I read the Ubuntu forums
regularly and I'm always adding some new trick that I find there. My
plan is to leave the installation on hda3 as a rescue installation,
since it always mounts hda2 anyway. The only thing I would do to it is
make it use the /home/jjj folder on hda2 as my home folder instead of
the one on hda3.

The sequence of events was:

(1) rsync, using command above, from hda3 to hda2
(2) edit the /grub/boot/menu.lst file by copying and pasting the
existing hda3 boot options, then editing them to make them boot to hda2
instead of hda3
(3) we ran a command (which I did not write down and have since
forgotten) to make grub use the new menu
(4) reboot and try the new boot menu options

When we got to (4), that's when we discovered the problem. To fix it we
tried numerous things, including editing /etc/fstab, although I can't
remember exactly what we did. We also tried a couple other things,
which I can't remember. We discovered that when it boots, it boots to
hda3 instead of hda2 even if we select the hda2 option on the grub
menu. At least I think that is what is happening.

 Then it occurred to Mike that the problem was the -H switch we used in
rsync. Something is hard linked to fstab on hda3 (lrm?), so the hda2
boot option just boots to hda3. That's the limit of my knowledge of
what may be wrong. I am continuing to use the computer, although the
only significant new stuff I have done is check e-mail. In other words,
there is no danger of losing critical stuff. 

At this point it is 48 hours later (I have been too busy to write this
all down and send it to the list). My memory is fading. I am not sure
if everything I stated above is accurate. For example, am I really
booting to hda3? It might be helpful if I knew some commands to verify
what I am really booting to.

> At this point, I think the following command should work
> 
> cp -arf --remove-destination (root on /dev/hda3) (root on /dev/hda2)
> 
> But since I screwed up, I'd appreciate a couple more eyes checking this
> out.

I could just try the above command, but it would be helpful if I could
get some additional suggestions. Some commands to further verify what
is happening, for example, would be helpful.
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