Re: [tlug] Help understanding a disk near-disaster

[David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com>]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012, at 17:19, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > That was going to be my guess. You had a filesystem mounted by 2
>  > Linux installations at the same time. That's a big problem unless
>  > the filesystem is one of the clustered filesystems,
>
> Er, even then it would still be a big problem because in his setup the
> two installations each think they monopolize the metadata for the
> underlying data store.

Thanks for the thoughts, Steve. But I'd like to understand a little
better... if I've umounted, doesn't that basically "free" the filesystem
from the OS that had mounted it, i.e. back to a "neutral" state? (hard
to find the words...)  What sort of metadata remain "tied" to the
original OS, and what sort of trouble can happen because of that?
(recall that this is not my / or /usr or anything "important", just a
"random" additional ext4).

> Use of hibernation as a substitute for a real virtualized operating
> system is just asking for trouble IMO.  It's not designed for that.
> Install a hypervisor, or shut the OS down.

As a matter of fact, I do (recently) have VirtualBox installed, and am
using it for a WinXP instance that I need to work with. Quite
impressed so far... seems just as powerful as the VMware I used ~7-8
years ago, and quite stable and robust (although I'm not pushing its
limits by any means).

I guess this would do for me, but if what I really want is a "live
boot", it looks like VB (at least recent versions?) is not set up to do
this kind of thing - i.e. it seems to want to have a "permanent" virtual
disk for each guest OS. I'm sure there must be good technical reasons
for this that are beyond my ken... esp. if it's true (as I think I read
somewhere) that they removed the live guest boot capability from the
product recently.

Dave