Hi,

I am a new user to OpenBSD. I am running OpenBSD 2.8 on a Sun Sparcstation 20 with a SCSI drive. One day, I was screweing around with the fstab file in "/etc". I guess I changed the main partition (SCSI Address 3) to read-only instead of read-write. I cann't do anything anymore (even in root mode). When I tried to fix fstab with Vi, it gave me a error saying that I cann't make a temporairy file because I was read-only mode. The same with the mount command. I tried this...

and

Those didn't work. The filesystem is still Read-only.
If anyone knows a solution to this, please tell me!

Thanks,
Curt.

Sorry if I am double posting, but I did find out this. On boot, it says this...

Boot the bsd.rd kernel, it loads in a ramdisk, then you can mount the normal / partition on say, /mnt/root and vi /mnt/root/etc/fstab to fix your error.

I cann't figure out how to boot it. On bootup, I did Control+A, and it brought me into the diagnostic mode. I typed "boot bsd.(whatever the extension was), then I typed "/" and that didn't work. I tried "/mnt/root" and that still didn't work. I was in the boot kernal that was mentioned. I dont even know what partition to boot. I dont even know the partitions.

Did it actually boot the kernel, or did it give you an error message? If it booted the kernel you would have seen a prompt for install/upgrade/shell. Choose shell.

To mount a partition you use the mount command, you can find the man pages at OpenBSD.org. The root partition is probably on /dev/sd0a .

Are you seriously running OpenBSD 2.8? Why on earth are you running such an ancient version? The latest is 4.4. Given the troubles you're having, you are probably much better off just installing 4.4 and starting over fresh.

Chort beat me to it, but there really are no reasons to be screwing around with 2.8. Either you can screw around with the system, and the reasonable choices are 4.4 release, -stable and -current, or you've got some wacky 2.8 dependent application in production, and you'd better not be screwing with it. ;-)

Okay, this may be a me too post, but OpenBSD 2.8 was released back in December of 2000 -- nearly eight years ago. Unless there is some extenuating circumstance, installing the latest version is a prudent choice.

Just an FYI, I have a SparcStation 20 currently running 4.3 (lazyness is why its not running 4.4. I wouldn't expect much out of it...