Deleted Swap and Now Things are Going Wrong... (Debian Jessie)
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Deleted Swap and Now Things are Going Wrong... (Debian Jessie)
Well, I had transferred Debian over to a larger hard drive (via using GParted to copy the whole partition) and it worked (to my surprise) for a while, but then I realized that it was using the old hard drives swap, so I deleted it and rebooted back into Debian and guess what? It wont boot. So I tried to put the swap back, that didn't work. I do have an error message though, it says something like this: scripts/local-premount/rescuevol-can't remember-not found
But that has nothing to do with my problem (I am guessing).
Does anybody have any information they could give me? Reinstallation is not an option, and I have already tried booting off of the old drive, and it wont boot either.
If you back up /home, and /etc, you usually have most of the stuff you need, and you can do a reinstall. That's your fall back.
Has all mention of the old hard drive been removed from the system? Remember, you may have had /dev/sda, then added /dev/sdb. But when you pull sda and sling it, sdb suddenly becomes sda
Why not post the contents of /etc/fstab? That will help,
Its not my personal stuff that I am worried about (oddly), the things that I am worried about are my installed packages. As I don't have internet at home it will be very hard to get all the packages that I have installed back installed.
And I haven't gotten rid of the old drive yet, I don't plan to. I just moved Debian to a larger drive. The full Debian installation is still there in the old drive, but that wont boot either. Could /etc/fstab be saying that the old swap is still in the old drive? Is that why it is not working?
As I need information to do these things before I have to disconnect from the Internet, what would I have to do to /etc/fstab to be able to boot my system again?
When I get home I can try to post the contents of fstab, but if I disconnect the other (older) drive completely from my computer, would that help?
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
Posts: 5,484
Rep:
Your original drive would have been the first drive, /dev/sda, when you copied it via gparted, you copied it onto the second drive, /dev/sdb.
So, first off, how many drives are connected, which one is now the primary/first drive(?), it should be your bigger drive, on that drive, change your /etc/fstab file, comment out the 'swap' line, it should now boot up when restarted.
If you didn't change anything on your old drive, it should (still) boot quite happily if it is the first/primary drive in your computer.
I do have an error message though, it says something like this: scripts/local-premount/rescuevol-can't remember-not found
But that has nothing to do with my problem (I am guessing).
Guess again.
I don't use Debian, but a meander through the script is likely to be enlightening. First option would be to remove swap from fstab, and make sure it isn't mention on boot (resume= keyword). The latter can be temporarily done from teh grub command line at boot.
on that drive, change your /etc/fstab file, comment out the 'swap' line, it should now boot up when restarted.
I have already tried once to change the /etc/fstab, but it didn't work.
The original /etc/fstab file is as follows: # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=aee3d498-71cb-4437-87ae-e678b37c7a0d / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sdc5 during installation
be31ec52-627f-4b86-b3bc-945563581873 none swap sw 0 0
It just completely hangs at boot. It gets past GRUB and then just hangs. It does the exact same thing when I boot either drive.
If I really need to, I can reinstall. Would I be correct if I said that there is a cache for all installed packages somewhere on the filesystem? That's the only problem, getting my installed packages back. That's what is important to me.
Last edited by Alex Smith-Fanning; 11-25-2014 at 04:49 PM.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
Posts: 5,484
Rep:
As you are using UUID, likely it is your problem.
Use 'blkid' to find out what they should be, enter them into your grub boot line, should sort it out.
(Also you could likely get away with using /dev/sd? in their place to get you back up & running.)
If you have pulled or swapped drives, then yoy HAVE to change /etc/fstab.
To fix this, boot on an install cd or rescue cd, get a terminal (Ctrl_Alt_f2 usually) and run
Quote:
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
That will show you a list of your partitions and their uuid; you can enter the correct uuid for your partition. If you don't know your partition, you can always mount one (on /mnt or /tmp is usually safe) and have a look at what is on it.
I fixed the issue with the whole system not booting. I simply downloaded the Debian rescue disk from the website, booted it up, and uninstalled cloud-initramfs-rescuevol and restarted my computer. The computer boots into Debian now, but I don't have a graphical desktop. I get the commandline interface to Debian. So I checked to see if XOrg is running, and it is. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get my GNOME graphical desktop back? Should I reinstall XOrg? Should I reinstall GNOME? What do I do?
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