bill@chinet.chi.il.us (Bill Mitchell) (01/15/90)
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.