Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!bill
From: bill@chinet.chi.il.us (Bill Mitchell)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: 1.5.0 crashes which weren't crashes after all
Message-ID: <1990Jan14.203440.19576@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 14 Jan 90 20:34:40 GMT
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 21


I've commented in recent postings that I was seeing my root device
being trashed under 1.5.0.  Seems I was crying wolf.  To mix a
metaphor, the sky is not falling after all.

I had put off looking into this as I was otherwise busy, and it was
easy to restore my /dev/hd3 root from a backup floppy.  today I
looked into it, and found it was completely my fault.

Prior to 1.5.0, I had been loading root on /dev/ram from /dev/hd3.
To conserve ramdisk space, my /etc/rc deleted programs from /etc
and /bin which had been placed there only to support system startup
(/etc/mount and other stuff).  I had duplicates in /usr/bin for use
once the system was up.  The /dev/hd3 copy of the root volume still
had these programs intact for the next boot.

Of course, when I booted 1.5.0 with /dev/hd3 as the root volume, the
/etc/rc script deleted this stuff from the copy on /dev/hd3 and the
next boot attempt failed.

Dumb.