Re: Moving system disk provokes data loss?

[Brett Lymn <blymn%internode.on.net@localhost>]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 07:43:38PM -0500, John D. Baker wrote:
> Posting to both netbsd-users and pkgsrc-users as the topic spans base
> system and package issues.
> 

Could it possibly be more like "moving system disk causes confusion"?  I
had a very similar situation a little over a year ago, perhaps what I
experienced applies but, then again, it may not.

I too was playing with disk juggling on a machine, upgrading my boot
disk to a SSD and added a larger spinning rust disk for user data but
left the old disk in the machine for reference and to copy data from.  I
had everything set up fine, copied a bunch of backups to the new
capacious disk and thought everything was fine.  Next time I rebooted my
backups were gone and some apps that were working fine were misbehaving.
For a while I just put it done to me messing things up due to some
brainfart caused by some stress in my personal life.  Eventually I
realised what was actually happening was even though the boot loader was
loading the bootstrap from the correct disk when the kernel went to find
the root file system it was finding the *old* copy of the root which
meant it was using an old fstab that mounted the file systems from the
old disk instead of the shiny new one.  Once I woke up to this and
configured the kernel to use the correct device for / I suddenly found
the backups I had made and my apps started working correctly.

So, is it possible that you still had an old, intact, netbsd / file
system laying about that the kernel found and used, once you performed
your final changes the kernel then found the newer / and so you all of a
sudden had all the changes that had been made during the data migration?

-- 
Brett Lymn