Hi Stephen,
The other version was one that would partition the laptop disk into 'mirrors' of itself.
I do something like this on a server, to be able to boot back into a known good state if an update ruins the system.
/boot -- 1 I think
In my setup I use two boot partitions (or actually /boot is part of /1 and /2). This is especially useful when doing kernel updates (instead of installs), like SuSE does.
/1 /2 /home -- 1 I think
Yes, user data is shared. Also share /var/log and /var/spool (and /srv), but not /var/lib (rpmdb etc). Another proof of how messy /var is...
boot is set up to boot into say /1 the first time, and then the asyncd updates /2 to whatever the network says it should be.
I just rsync the known good system to /mnt/backsys (which is /2) before an update, but then my setup is used to be able to roll back, not forward :) .
Grub is changed appropriately
In this roll back setup it is also important to adjust /etc/fstab according to the / partition. It's an integral part of the rsync scriplet I use. Seems to work flawlessly, but luckily I never had to rely on it (knock on wood ;) .
Leonard.