Re: implicit mounting of the root partition for rw

[Jordan Uggla]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 2:31 PM, U.Mutlu <address@hidden> wrote:
> grub2 on my system (Debian 6) seems to implicitly mount the
> root partition for rw. But in /etc/fstab it is mounted again.
> Isn't that additional mounting not harmful for the HD ?
> Can one safely disable the mount for / in /etc/fstab ?
>
>
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>

Grub needs to be able to read files from /boot/ to be able to load the
kernel. This is unavoidable, and does absolutely no harm to the hard
drive. In addition, with the single possible exception of writing to
/boot/grub/grubenv (not done by default in Debian's grub) grub never
writes to the hard drive at all. Once grub loads the linux kernel and
jumps to it, almost nothing that grub has done is applicable to the OS
being booted. Grub doesn't, and can't, "mount" the root filesystem for
the OS it loads, the kernel and initrd scripts need to do that on
their own from the ground up after grub is finished with its part and
is long gone. This is simply how booting works. In addition to that,
"mounting" is not something that affects hardware, you can read from
and write to a device through /dev/ without mounting it. What mounting
does is tell the kernel to interpret the bits that it is already able
to read from the hardware so that you can work with the abstraction
that is files and paths.

In short, nothing can or should be done differently, your hardware is fine.

-- 
Jordan Uggla