foo bar bletch

Here is some advice for yinz.  Suppose you have two drives, a master and slave (hey, I didn't invent this terminology), and you boot from the master ("hda").  But the slave ("hdb") is thrice as large, and currently not being used for anything, and you want, out of a misguided sense of the admirability of simplicity, to get rid of hda and replace it with hdb.  So you partition it analogously, cp -a everything over fine and dandy, then chroot to what will be the new root of the filesystem and run the installer for your bootloader.  Then you swap the drives, restart, fix some permissions, and think you're good to go.  Know this!  You might still be booting from hda (now named hdb), even though it's not the primary master!  You should check to see if this is the case by disconnecting it, before you run shred on it, so that you don't have to go all out of your way to make a boot CD (since you didn't make either a boot CD or a boot disk beforehand, natch).

Here are the morals:

1. dd is your friend.
2. Don't just assume that the bootloader installed successfully, saying that if it hadn't, grub-install would not have returned a 0 exit status, but look and see whether or not it has.

Comments

[dave zacuto]

There is no master who can lose mastery.

[ben wolfson]

True, but do we not read that "A man should avoid displaying deep familiarity with any subject"?

Further, we read this:

You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain.

Truly sage advice!

[bitchphd]

For the record, this would be your worst post ever.

[ben wolfson]

Bitch.

[dave zacuto]

Kenko's wisdom is really just the maxx, as always, but he is of course "working" within the Japanese sumptuary customs of ostentation. A man should avoid displaying mastery of any subject, of course, and I would further add that even the most meager evidence of motor skills is to be vigorously batted off and/or away. This, in itself, though, is not the same as not having this mastery.

[ben wolfson]

Naturally. Nothing is less becoming an educated man than the ability to convey himself, using his own body, from one place to another.

[ben wolfson]

That is, the use of that ability is unbecoming.

[Craig]

Tell me more about this deer antler business. It could be a problem.

[ben wolfson]

I'm afraid that's all I know.