On Fri 22 Feb 2019 at 09:19:53 (-0500), Stephen P. Molnar wrote: > On 02/22/2019 09:13 AM, Dan Ritter wrote: > > Stephen P. Molnar wrote: > > > My Debian Stretch system has three HD's. I want to remove one of the HD's > > > (not sda) and replace it with a new HD.. > > > What I need to be sure of is, if I remove the old drive from the fstab and > > > delete the mount point will the system boot after I put in the new HD. so > > > that I can edit the fstab and create a mount point for the new drive? > > > Hence, the request for the sanity check. > > > > > The system needs the following to boot: > > - the BIOS or UEFI needs to know which drive has a boot loader. > > - that drive needs a boot loader (usually grub) > > - the boot loader needs to know where to load the kernel and > > possibly an init filesystem from > > - the kernel needs to be able to mount /, the root partition. > > > > Typically, all of those things will be on one drive, and that's > > usually /dev/sda. However, it's possibly to change all of them. > > > > You're probably safe. If you want to be sure, run a test: > > - shutdown to power off > > - unplug power from the drive you're going to replace > > - try to boot > > > > If that succeeds, shut down again and go ahead with the > > replacement. If it fails, you need to trace the boot process > > above and find out what's on the drive you're replacing, > > and arrange for that to be changed or copied. > > > Thanks for the reply. > > The OS is on dev/sda. The disk I changing is /dev/sdc
I think we're assuming that you have something better than /dev/sdaX in your /etc/fstab, UUIDs or LABELs. With modern PCs, you can be surprised by how these device names are assigned. Cheers, David.
