[ale] Reboot wedging problems after disk transplant

[johnmills at speakeasy.net (John Mills)]

ALErs -

I recently moved my RH-7.3 files to a larger HDD and now I am having 
problems recovering from power outages.

Boots after power loss now show 'filesystem integrity failure' and
commonly, lost INODES. (I haven't verified yet whether they are repeat
offenders.)  This means the system can't go through its automatic fixup
cycle and eventually complete its reboot. When I need it from out of town, 
this is a _RealPain_(TM)!

I would like to run 'badblocks -o <bad_block_list>' on the partition,
followed by 'fsck.ext3 -l <bad_block_list>' to take any badsters out of
the pool.

PROBLEM: the partition in question is mounted as '/' ($%^&!!) which means
I can't simply umount it and work.

I suppose I could 'tar' the contents of '/' to a directory in another
partition, put in some soft-links from _that_ partition's root, patch
'/etc/fstab', and reboot with the old contents of '/' now being found
through links to the newly made directory. (I'm not sure how the new
location of '/etc/fstab' will be resolved, though ...)

Any simpler suggestions? Can I configure the boot to force a
non-interactive filesystem repair in such a case? If I can, should I?

TIA.

 John Mills
 john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu

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