On Sun, Jun 04, 2017 at 10:42:23AM -0400, Haines Brown wrote:

> Another anomaly is what when I boot the old devuan, the boot goes to
> recovery mode despite what is selected in the GRUB menu. A control-D
> continues the boot normally. It showed up only fairly recently. But
> since I seldom reboot it, I didn't worry much about the issue. The two
> disks are almost the same, one being a bit older than the other. My
> Debian is on /dev/sdb and I'm installing to /dev/sda, I wonder whether
> the mongrolized install might be not be some kind of cross over between
> the two devices caused by BIOS.

One trick I've used is to place an identification file in the root of
each file system. Such as

/I-am-old-devian in /dev/sdb and /I-am-new0devuan in /dev/sda.

It might help tell them apart independent of BIOS renumbering.

Or maybe you're booting a kernel from the old system with a root file
system from the new one?

I once had two Debians on my system, a stable one and a testing one,
and I messed up my /etc/fstab on one of them so i had a root partition
from one mounted with a /usr from another. Total screwup when I did a
routine security upgrade. Hard to figure out, because a lot of
packages worked with mixed system versions.

-- hendrik