rsync differences between Fedora/Ubuntu?

[Matt McCutchen]

On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 12:29 +1300, Carl Turney wrote: 
> (I'm only one step above a user, so would appreciate any technical 
> answers thoroughly explained.  But if you're in a real rush, I could 
> just forward your reply to a local wizard for translation.)
> 
> With the script below, I use rsync to mirror the /boot partition and the 
> / (without /boot) partition on to removable ATA/IDE hard drives. 
> (Insertion/removal of mirror drives are during power down.)
> 
> This script works perfectly on my Fedora Core 5 system...  After backing 
> up and umount-ing, the /mnt/newboot and /mnt/newroot are empty and the 
> mirrored disks are exact bootable clones.
> 
> But corresponding commands in my Ubuntu Hardy (different hard disks, 
> same platform otherwise) seem to send the copies to the /mnt/newroot 
> DIRECTORY of the ORIGINAL source root partition (and probably NOT on to 
> the mounted partition - I haven't checked if it is there).  After 
> umount-ing and even power cycling, they're in the wrong place.

That suggests that /mnt/newroot isn't being mounted properly...

> No error messages in mounting or unmounting mirror drives.  However, 
> after unmounting, when trying to RE-mount /dev/sdb3 on to /mnt/newroot, 
> system replies that the partition is busy and mounted to /

Something really weird is going on there.  Could you please reboot the
machine, perform the following procedure:

1. cat /proc/mounts
2. Run your command to mount /mnt/newroot .
3. cat /proc/mounts
4. Run your command to unmount /mnt/newroot .
5. cat /proc/mounts

and post all the resulting output so I can see what is happening
to /dev/sdb3?

-- 
Matt