I'm looking for explanations for the following:

I two partitions on my harddisk, one of which has a linux distro (an old knoppix).

In fdisk, I delete these 2 and create one new one of the space (i.e. both partitions have been merged). Partition is "formatted" i.e. with mkfs.

I write a load of files onto the new partition, filling it 85%.

For fun, I try to boot the old knoppix distro, expecting a ton of errors.

Incredibly, it boots all the way to console! A load of tools are missing, but the system essentially works. In fact, "ls" still seems to think the filesystem exists!

Who knows how to explain?

i thought knoppix was like that - you take any computer and boot a knoppix cd and you've got linux, right?

... except my old knoppix was a hard disk install, *not* the live cd. i.e. I was able to boot a an overwritten distro. how do you explain that?

i've never used knoppix before, but i bet "ls" is just showing you a ramdisk. is there still software or data you remember loading there still there when you boot knoppix?

no, although it boots, the old hd overwrriten distro is obviously crippled, and is, to all intents and purposes unusable.

I only meant to point it out as a curiosity.

ramdisk doesn't explain why it should still work after and power down and reboot.

This may all concern the ext3 filesystem and how parts of it are still intact, despite the fact that other parts have been brutally overwritten.