[WBEL-users] 2nd disk

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 08:52:09AM -0700, John Lowry wrote:
> 
> Friends,
> 
> I'm trying to mount my old suse 8.1 drive as hdb on my WhiteBox machine.  Both
> disks boot independently.  However, booting White Box fails because apparently
> it wants to mount hdb as /var, and gets lots of read only file system warnings.
> 
> Any ieas?

I've never used SuSe in my life, however, I've had somewhat similar
problems when putting two RHL disks into the same machine.  The
problem was actually disk labels.

You'll want to check that the BIOS disks are what you want.  You
might try booting into single user mode, or emergency mode (add
"single" or "emergency" to the end of your boot commands in GRUB).

Emergency will mount your root filesystem and give you a root shell
so you can do investigation (it won't fsck your filesystem even if
it needs it, so use with caution).  It is one way to get control of
a machine that you need to, even if what you are doing is unsafe.
I've used it before to turn DMA on for an fsck, because hdparm is
run after fsck is run on your filesystems.  Saved myself several
hours of downtime.

It sure sounds like the culprit is in your /etc/fstab (that's what
it uses to pick where you mount what partition).  It'd be more
helpful if you gave a full error message, a bit more context of
where it is in the boot cycle, and the contents of your /etc/fstab.

Boot each machine and run e2label /dev/hdaX on each partition (where
X is the partition number).  If any two from the two machines are
identical, and your /etc/fstab uses that label, that's your problem.

Your symptoms don't exactly match mine, as RH would pick the wrong
root filesystem.  However, the differences might be accounted for by
SuSe being the other disk.

    Thanks,
        Kirby