On Thursday 23 December 2004 8:44 pm, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On a couple of my machines the answer is:
cat /proc/cmdline
It shows "root=/dev/hda3" etc. as part of the boot args.
PS: Thanks to Felix Miata for asking about /proc/cmdline or I would not have known about its existence.
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 19:18:03 +0000, Vince Littler
<****@***********.*******.**.**> wrote:
On Thursday 23 December 2004 10:21 am, Dan Am wrote:
Imagine a system, not quite unlike mine, with 3 primary partitions: /dev/ sda1,2,3. Each of these is bootable and has GRUB installed, and each GRUB uses a menu on its own partition. Suppose that each GRUB menu has an entry pointing to a single kernel in /boot on a 4th partition, /dev/sda4, which is also mounted as the root partition.
Whichever you booted, there would be no fundamental difference, except possibly for some traces in the memory used by the BIOS. I think the 'active partition' as used by the boot process will be marked by the '*', as pointed out by Jonas. But if you use the partitioner to change the active partition, that could change [not sure].
This is the point where I ask 'why do you want to know?', in the hope of finding a more answerable question.
rgds
Vince
Greg, I have left my original reply in place. There is a distinction between "the device I booted off", which I think Dan Am wants to know and the device which is specified as root to the kernel at boot time. In my case, I boot from GRUB on the MBR [I think], have /dev/sda1 as the active partition, pick up the kernel from /dev/sda5 and use /dev/sdb9 as the root partition. So which partition would Dan Am want? rgds Vince One final point, and sorry to sound crusty. I would be really grateful if people would NOT include my [or anyone's] email address in plain text in messages to the list, as it increases the exposure to spam via the archive. This often occurs as it did in this message in an autogenerated reply header as in:
On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 19:18:03 +0000, Vince Littler <****@***********.*******.**.**> wrote:
I have documented this on the OT list. This header should be configurable in any client, and if it is not, then I think there is a straight choice between conscientously editing the autogenerated text, or choosing a configureable client.