Problem booting after removing extra storage drives
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Problem booting after removing extra storage drives
Got a fedora core 4 install which resides on a 160 gig sata drive and had a secondary storage disks of 160 gig IDE (ext3 format, hda1) and 40 gig IDE (hdc1). I had to remove the 40gig and the 160gig secondary drives and I get the following message:
(during startup)
----------------------------------------------
Checking filesystems
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda1
open /dev/hdc1: No such file or directory
*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.
*** Warning -- SELinux is active
*** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
*** Run 'setenforce 1' to reenable.
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):
-----------------------------------------------
When I login, I can only open the files (i.e. etc/fstab) as read only so I don't know how to remove drives from the boot sequence. The extra storage drives are no longer available so I can't just put them back in and get update things normally.
No part of linux was on the secondary drives.
If I don't have a CD drive in the machine is there any other solution besides pulling on out of another machine? Is there a floppy image available that does the same thing?
You could as a desparate measure change the booting pararmeter to read-write instead of read only, to see if it helps. There are two ways of skinning this cat.
(1) Editing the Grub menu on-the-fly. Press "e" at the Grub screen and try to alter the "ro" to "rw" parameter in the kernel statement.
(2) Boot the system up manually. Press "c" at the Grub screen to get a Grub prompt. Ask Grub to tell you which partition has its menu file by command "find /grub/menu.lst". When Grub return with the answer say (hd0,1) you instruct Grub to display its menu.lst on the screen by command "cat (hd0,1)/grub/menu.lst". Once you see the lines how Fedora boots itself enter the line exactly but altering the "ro" to "rw" in the kernel statement. After typing the "initrd" statement add an extra statement"boot" to fire up Fedora. Grub call its menu as "menu.lst" but "grub.conf" is also used by the Red Hat family so try the second if the first doesn not succeed.
--------------------------
Advice I would give to a user without a CD drive
You should make a bootable Grub floppy, by following the steps laid down by Chapter 3.1 of the Grub Manual to dd stage1 and stage2 into a floppy. That will give a Grub prompt with which you can boot up any Linux manually.
The method (2) above is the gerneal method to boot any Linux (or any OS) manually by a Grub prompt. It is highly relevant to a Linux user who has no access to Linux CD for rescuing a distro.
I tried the two methods you mentioned (hitting e and c at the grub screen) and did the commands from menu.lst and grub.conf (they seem to be the same) but no luck. When I login everything is still readonly.
I'm beginning to wonder if the SELinux is causing it to switch back to a read only mode. Is there a way to turn that off?
This is not a GRUB problem. Presumably one of the secondary drives was set to be mounted in fstab or the removal of the extra drives has caused the drive naming to change.
When you log in to single user mode do:
mount -o remount,rw /
This should remount the root filesystem read-write. Then you can go in and fix /etc/fstab. In so doing make sure that the drive numbering is correct for the remaining drive in the system 9you can use fdisk -l to tell you what drives/partitions you have). Then you should be able to reboot (or just do "init 5" -- assuming your default runlevel is 5) and all should be well.
This is not a GRUB problem. Presumably one of the secondary drives was set to be mounted in fstab or the removal of the extra drives has caused the drive naming to change.
When you log in to single user mode do:
mount -o remount,rw /
This should remount the root filesystem read-write. Then you can go in and fix /etc/fstab. In so doing make sure that the drive numbering is correct for the remaining drive in the system 9you can use fdisk -l to tell you what drives/partitions you have). Then you should be able to reboot (or just do "init 5" -- assuming your default runlevel is 5) and all should be well.
That worked perfectly, Thanks so much. I didn't have to change any of the drive numbering either.
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