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From: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 13:05:12 -0400
To: Joel Hatton <joel@auscert.org.au>
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cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: How to successfully mount /root if not in fstab?
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On Aug 2, 2004, at 2:49 AM, Joel Hatton wrote:
> I've been caught out (twice now - yes, I was stupid enough to do this
> twice!) with mounting /root after removing a hard disk from my system 
> and
> would like to know why it wasn't trivial to recover.

The system requires a working root account in order to be repairable in 
single-user mode.  One consequence of this is that /root needs to be on 
the same partition as /, for much the same reasons that /bin or /etc 
needs to be on /.

-- 
-Chuck