> what is the goal in having an identical copy of the disk? It's not even so much that.
It's that the person who will be changing the disks will be hardly capable of just that, and will not get anything close to root access to the machine. And I am afraid that all that complexity around automounting the different filesystems, autounmounting, and automatically ensuring the filesystem is clean and unmounted at the time the disk is to be swapped could be quite unreliable. -nik
