hi, I'm having a bit of difficulty getting my system to boot and seem to be going round in circles.. hopefully someone will have been there and done that, or at least have some guidance on where to look next.

OK.. so.. I've got a server with 5 SCSI drives setup with RAID 5 and LVM. Also attached to the server is a storage array with 8 IDE drives, 1 of which has a problem, but all are used in a variety of filesystems... unfortunately I have set these drives to be checked at boot with fsck... I've no idea why I did this (typo/mindfreeze/whatever) but unfortunately that's how it is :-( - this means that the system won't boot unless it can succesfully check these additional filesystems - however they do not form part of the root filesystem etc so aren't necessary.

So.. I'm trying to edit the fstab to turn off the check on these filesystems so that I can get the system booted. Getting to this damn file is nigh on impossible.... let me explain what I've done so far...

1. Used maintenance shell to try to edit the fstab... unfortunately it drops you in a read only filesystem. So, I ammended the kernel params at startup from 'ro' to 'rw' - absolutely no effect. I also added in the 'S' option for single user mode. No success - whatever way I try to cut it, the filesystem is always read only. I also thought of trying to mount (bind) the filesystem in rw mode, but without having write access to the filesystem this doesn't work..:-(

2. I tried the linux rescue CD, and tried mdadm --examine --scan, and mdadm --assemble --scan to reassemble the Raid array - but it just throws an error saying only 2 disks are available, which is not enough to rebuild the array,... now I know that the disks are working as it boots into the OS far enough to do the fsck on the additional filesystems, and I can read data in the maintenance shell... so it is there, just not loaded in the rescue cd...

3. I also tried knoppix, but this also doesn't load the raid array, and wont let me recreate the array as I can't write the config anywhere for mdadm... plus it also seems to only see 4 of the 5 disks....

So, does anyone have any ideas on what I can do ?

Cheers

Just to get it straight in my head, are you booting from a software RAID5? Because I can't figure out why knoppix, especially the latest version which is great, can't see it.

x_terminat_or_3 posted this in another thread:
Give that a try from the single user boot. If that doesn't work, look at this bottom of this page for similar threads.

Great ! remount with rw worked !

I didn't realise you could do that with the root filesystem... silly me. :-)

Cheers

(btw, it is a software RAID.. and yes, I was also surprised knoppix (v5.01) didn't pick it up)

Glad that it worked! BTW, get a copy of the new knoppix. It's version 5.1.1 and it really is better at detecting things.