I configured my new HDD with an extra root partition. Partition 2 is for my current OS (Libranet 3) (along with partition 1 for boot and partition 6 for home) and partition 7 is for my old OS (Libranet 2.8). My new OS boots fine. I can mount partition 7 and see all the files from my old OS. However, when I try to boot the old OS, I get a complaint from reiserfsck and I am forced to single-user mode. The complaint reads:

reiserfs_open: neither new nor old reiserfs format found on /dev/hdc8
reiserfsck: Cannot not [sic] open filesystem on "/dev/hdc8"
Warning... fsck.reiserfs for device /dev/hdc8 exited with signal 6.
fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. Please note that the root filesystem is currently mounted readonly. To remount it read-write:
#mount -n -o remount,rw /

I can run reiserfsck from the new OS. /dev/hdc8 is fine. I can remount within single-user mode as instructed and see all my files from the old OS.

To create the partition for the old OS, I formatted the partition from the old OS and then copied (cp -ax /) everything to the partition.

I think that I am close to having this working, but at this point I am stuck.

I suspect an incompatibility between the version of reiserfs in Libranet 2.8 and the version of reiserfs in Libranet 3.0. When you ran Libranet 3.0's reiserfsck it may have made changes to the old file system to where it is a hybrid between the two versions of reiserfs. That leads to the message:

"reiserfs_open: neither new nor old reiserfs format found on /dev/hdc8
reiserfsck: Cannot not [sic] open filesystem on "/dev/hdc8""

You could check out my theory by redoing this work:

"To create the partition for the old OS, I formatted the partition from the old OS and then copied (cp -ax /) everything to the partition."

and then never use the Libranet 3 version of reiserfsck against the old system.

---------------------------
Steve Stites

I tried booting the old OS before I ran reiserfsck. It was only after that attempt failed that I ran reiserfsck from the new OS to be sure that nothing was mangled on the partition.

Is anyone familiar with dd? I'm wondering whether I should have copied the old root to the new partition using dd rather than cp -ax /. Would the command be

dd if=/dev/hdc8 of=/dev/hdd5

I don't see how the cp command could corrupt the fs though.

For the record, the solution was very simple. (Aren't they all, once you know what you're doing?) When I copied the old OS from the old HDD to the new one, it moved from partition 8 to partition 5. Accordingly, the entries in fstab needed to change.