An interesting thing happened to my Linux system over the Christmas
holidays. With all this talk about partitioning disks and installing
Linux, I thought I'd share it with you. Hopefully it will prevent
someone falling into the same trap.
When I initially installed my Linux system, I had 3 partitions for
Linux:
/dev/hda2 /
/dev/hda3 swap
/dev/hda4 /usr
Everything worked fine, until just after Christmas my system failed to
boot correctly, saying that it couldn't find the kernel image.
I started the rescue system, and ran fdisk -l. It told me that my disks
were now:
/dev/hda2 swap
/dev/hda3 /
/dev/hda4 /usr
(i.e. hda2 and hda3 had been swapped.)
Fortunately I was able to change /etc/fstab, boot the system from
/dev/hda3 and re-run lilo. My system now works fine.
I think the problem came about from two areas:
1: The way I partitioned the disk.
2: Use of a partitioning tool to clean up the DOS partition.
When I initially partitioned my disk, I split the disk in two. I then
took a small swap partition from the end of the first part of the disk.
Fips wouldn't allow me to split the second half (as it wasn't a FAT
partition), so I had to DOS format it before splitting it. I obviously
also formatted it using yast. My disk then looked like:
+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| /dev/hda1 | /dev/hda3 | /dev/hda2 | /dev/hda4 |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
At some time around Christmas, I ran a Lite version of a partitioning
tool to change the block size of my DOS partition, which may have
noticed that the partitions were in the "wrong" order, so it re-ordered
them. I cannot confirm this as I don't want to start from scratch
again, but the only thing I can think of that I did between running
Linux with the disk as shown above and having to rescue my system
because hda2 and hda3 had been swapped was running this partitioning
tool.
Just thought I'd pass this information on. It may help someone.
Paul Abraham
--
speaking for myself.
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