I recently reported that I am suffering random reboots. I have now discovered an inconsistency in the reporting of the mount point of the root directory of my Gentoo install. First a little history:
I spent about two and a half weeks trying to install ANYTHING that would remain stable and useable. Finally Gentoo is running well. Repeatedly, I was unable to understand how grub was installing the MBR, or where. I had three SATA drives and one ATA drive, and I removed the ATA drive to get rid of the problem of naming of drives inconsistently. So far so good; however, the SATA drives are booted in order that they are named in the BIOS, so I wasn't certain which drive the MBR was being installed on. Leaving out many details... Just when I was about to give up, I discovered that if I changed the boot order, a different grub appeared. One from Gentoo and one from Ubuntu. After a pitched battle, I was finally able to settle on Gentoo, and it's running pretty well. Except for random reboots. I just noticed that the return from # df is as follows, without any specific drive: designation appearing for / : spineless ulod # df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 105392960 19272948 80766360 20% / /dev/root 105392960 19272948 80766360 20% / rc-svcdir 1024 76 948 8% /lib64/rc/init.d udev 10240 212 10028 3% /dev shm 1027568 0 1027568 0% /dev/shm /dev/sdb6 62144164 45189664 13797732 77% /home After some investigation, I found the following inconsistent indentification of the / directory's physical location: | | / partition | | where represented | 500GB HDD represented as | |----------------------------+--------------------------| | /boot/grub.conf "root" | (hd1,0) | | /boot/grub.con kernel line | root=/dev/sda5 | | /etc/fstab | /devsdb5/ | | /etc/mtab | /dev/root | | sfdisk -l | /dev/sda5 | | /df | /dev/root | | | | In grub, it is located first as hd1 (/dev/sdb) and then as /dev/sda5. That is where I want it to be. This is necessary apparently because grub would see it on /dev/sdb at first, but once the kernel boots, the drive would physically be /dev/sda. The identifation of this partition in /etc/fstab as /dev/sdb5, is apparently not being honored? I'm asking, because I am not well versed in the events in the boot order. df then reports it as /dev/root, ignoring the device id. The partition is seen by sfdisk as /dev/sda5, as it also is by gparted. So, am I safe to rename this partition in /etc/fstab as /dev/sda5? Secondly, would this help explain random reboots? I now plan to simplify the arrangement, and reorganize all of the active partitions on a single drive. That's another story. Thank you, Alan
