I have Sarge and Etch installed on separate partitions on this machine. My intention was to move to Etch but my wife objected to a couple of differences from Sarge so we are stuck in Sarge for a while. I'm keeping Etch up to date but have been booting into the Etch partition to do so. Recently, I have been exploring chroot as a means to avoid rebooting. The Debian documentation explains how to do this, assuming that Etch is installed via debootstrap, not from CD and netinstall. The Debian documentation instructs the user to enter the chroot environment issue the command

chroot # cd /dev; /sbin/MAKEDEV generic ; cd -

I don't know if this command will make permanent changes to my Etch /dev, rendering it unusable when I boot into that partition. I know that omitting this command and setting up tty8 as the chroot Etch console, I have USB que issues within a minute of logging into Etch via ALT-CTRL-F8.

If I execute the "/sbin/MAKEDEV generic" command in the chroot environment, will /dev be correctly populated for the Etch kernel when I later boot into Etch?

Thanks.

What will happen is that /dev will be mounted as tmpfs, thus hiding your hardcoded /dev.
Well, that's the theory as I see it...

edit: actually you might have some problems with different naming (ex sda1<->sda2) so maybe a very little tweaking would be necessary

Thanks. I issued the "/sbin/MAKEDEV generic" command and chroot using tty8 works very nicely. Haven't tried to boot back into Etch. When I do, little tweaking, if needed, is a small price to pay for the convenience, now.