I stupidly edited the /etc/fstab file on my dedicated server and now the server will not boot and is not reachable.

My hosting company say that a reprovision is required but I do not believe them and this also means a loss of data.

The disk or data is not corrupt and I fail to see why a reprovision would be needed as surely there are ways to correct the fstab file or load manually.

before I did the changes I copied the fstab file as fstabsav and have told the hosting company to simply mount manually and copy the file back to fstab.

In essence the change was that I removed this line
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1

Can anyone help and let me know how to resolve this issue without reprovision ?

Please only answer if you know the solution and are not just guessing or provding a solution that you think will work.

Thanks,

Robert.

It's as simple as booting with a LiveCD, mounting the root partition to some mount point, and changing fstab (or copying it back).

Of course, that's not possible from remote, but trivial if you are on site.