[CLUE-Cert] Answers to some of the questions from last meeting

[Dennis J Perkins]

Lynn Danielson wrote:

> Dennis Perkins wrote:
> > I have a couple of comments regarding the discussion of the boot
> > process two weeks ago.  I double-checked and the MBR only takes
> > one sector, not two. I also found that the partition table resides
> > in the same sector.
>
> Thank you for following up on this.  I was pretty sure that this was
> the case, but a couple people in the group seemed certain it was two
> sectors.

I was one of them.

> > But one of the boot scripts remounts the root partition as read-only > in order to run fsck on it.  If everything is ok, it remounts it
> > again, this time as read-write.  It then runs fsck on the other
> > partitions listed in /etc/fsck.
>
> Do you mean /etc/fstab?  The sixth field of fstab specifies the order
> that the filesystems should be checked by fsck at boot time.  The root
> filesystem should always be the first one.
>

You're correct.  My fingers sometimes have a mind of their own.

>
> Does anyone know what the dump field (field five of fstab) is for?
>

Most Unix systems have a pari of commands called dump and restore, that back up an entire partition or drive.  According to the man page,
there are nine levels, with 9 being the default.  0 means do a complete backup, while the others apparently indicate some form of
incremental backup.  The man page indicated that the option nodump can prevent backing up a partition.  There are other options as well that
could affect these flags, so read the man pages first!

Note that dump/restore are filesystem specific.  For example, the versions for ext2 will not work with anything other than an ext2
partition.


>
> Lynn
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--
  Dennis