On 1/23/26 03:02, alain williams wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 02:40:10PM -0700, D. R. Evans wrote:
All the system info is in that second partition. I don't rightly recall why
the first partition is present (it's been an awfully long time since I
installed this disk). I suspect that it's reserved for swap, although I
doubt that swapping has ever occurred.
As it says: it is a boot partition.
So when you get into the chrooted environment you also should do:
mount /dev/sda1 /boot
This means that the root filesystem is /dev/sda2, rather than /dev/sda1 as
you assumed.
Correct.
Identify the hard disk that contains your system, look at /proc/partitions.
By "the hard disk that contains your system", I assume you mean the RAID disk.
Yes
But should I be using /dev/sda2 or /dev/md126 (as listed in /proc/partitions)??
Prolly /dev/md126 - what works.
So here I have a question. This looks like it will try to copy the /dev/
from the running OS (i.e., the non-RAID drive) and overwrite the /dev that
is on the RAID disk.
Why would one do that? The /dev that was on the RAID disk worked fine until
the other drive of the pair failed; so why does it need to be overwritten by
the
/dev from the running system?
If you type the following it will tell you that /dev is a udev file system:
df -h
This is where device files are created on the fly as needed.
You need /dev/sda* and a few others - the easiest way is to copy from the live
system. When you reboot into your recovered system the contents that you copy
should be wiped out (or mounted over).
You got the right idea, but wrong method.
You need to "mount --bind" it to that directory not copy.
# mount --bind /dev /mnt/chrootdir/dev
I'm sorry if I'm being dense. In this situation, I'm very nervous about
running commands whose purpose I don't understand.
Good to be nervous!
--
With kindest regards, Alexander.
Debian - The universal operating system
https://www.debian.org
