[Discuss] How do you backup "/" with rsync?

[Steven Kurylo]

> I believe this inconsistency
> resulted from booting with the external drive on.  I think for that
> situation /dev/sda was associated with the external drive and /dev/sdb
> associated with the internal drive.  (IOW, the jmicron eSATA controller was
> being loaded and used before the ICH9 SATA controller.) Currently the
> external drive has no MBR so I have no idea how it found the correct grub
> menu.  However, that boot with external drive on did work.

Its quite possible for the BIOS to see the internal drive as the first
boot device, which then loads grub.  Grub loads the menu.lst and then
the kernel from the internal drive.  Once the kernel is running, it
could then load eSata controller, making the external drive sda, then
load the ICH9 controller, making the internal drive sdb.  Then once
the kernel starts mounting your fstab, it uses the sda like you've
specified - but sda is the external drive.

That would explain what you saw.

-- 
Steven Kurylo