Re: PROBLEM: mkfs wrote to wrong partition

[Guest section DW <dwguest@win.tue.nl>]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2001 at 12:50:16PM -0400, C. Linus Hicks wrote:

> The point of the following exercise was to move from a single CPU 400Mhz
> system to a dual 600Mhz and from an IDE disk to SCSI. I already had Redhat
> 7.1 with a 2.4.6 kernel running on the dual 600 and was replacing it with
> the system from the 400Mhz IDE system. All operations were performed on the
> dual 600.
> 
> While running the system booted with root=/dev/sda2 I made partitions on
> /dev/sdb just like on /dev/sda, then copied all files over. I modified the
> lilo.conf in /etc on /dev/sda2 to have boot=/dev/sdb and set the
> root=/dev/sdb2 for each image. I ran lilo then booted the system.
> 
> The system looked like I expected it to: mount showed /dev/sdb2 mounted as
> the root filesystem.

Note that this does not mean a thing:
If /etc/mtab is a link to /proc/mounts (bad idea) then the root fs is
usually just called /dev/root. Otherwise, mount will guess at the
appropriate name for the root filesystem by taking the one in /etc/fstab.

So, when mount showed /dev/sdb2 as root, this meant that you had
changed the root entry in /etc/fstab.

Probably you forgot to run lilo and booted the old kernel.