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).
> 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!
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Alain Williams
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