[ltp] A ThinkPad mystery

[Timothy Murphy]

I have an 80GB disk in my ThinkPad T20,
and I recently bought another 80GB disk
(fortunately a tiny bit bigger)
put it in the ultrabay, and copied the old disk to the new with
	dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc

I then mounted /dev/hdc5 (the root filesystem) on /mnt ,
and /dev/hdc2 on /mnt/boot,
and edited /mnt/etc/fstab with devices /dev/hdc5 , etc.
(I removed all LABEL references,
as the LABELs are presumably duplicated,
and this might cause confusion.
I also made sure there were no LABELs in the old /etc/fstab
and also in both grub.conf's.

Now for the mystery - the copy worked well,
in fact too well.
I couldn't find any way to _stop_ the machine
booting from the new disk.
I altered the boot order in the BIOS to boot from Hard Disk first,
I mounted /dev/hda5 on /mnt and /dev/hda2 on /mnt/boot
and ran
	grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hda

But whatever I did, I could not stop re-booting from the new disk.
The only way I could stop it was by physically removing the disk,
in which case it booted fine from /dev/hda .

It doesn't really matter, as I intended to take out the new disk anyway
(to put in another ThinkPad),
but I am very puzzled by this behaviour.

I wonder if anyone can explain it,
or has had a similar experience.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland