mounting root file system at boot: error w/ fstab (not fdisk)
 

I recently installed a Oneiric based Linux distro. It booted fine until I changed my fstab. I altered my fstab so I could access my ntfs and other Linux partitions. Now when I boot in recovery mode, it hangs after 2 or 3 seconds with this message:

And then it just hangs there forever until I press the reset button on my PC. I figure that I am getting this error because I didn’t configure my fstab correctly. Here is what my fstab looks like:

Even if ‘/dev/sda7’ is replaced with ‘UUID=ef73f69f-1518-4c85-967d-2ed64c157ef1’, I get the same error message on boot. I foolishly didn't back up my fstab before changing it so I have nothing to revert back to.

I tried adding # to the beginning of all the lines in my fstab except the line for swap and for root. My fstab therefore looks like this:

With this fstab, it still chokes at boot at around the 3 second mark with the same error message.

Here is the output of parted -l and fdisk -l from my LiveDVD:

What am I doing wrong?

I tried posting in the Linux Mint forums, but no one has replied with a solution so I thought I would try here. I hope that's not a problem.

Good idea to comment out the unneeded lines in fstab, but the partition you are missing is:

This most likely contains your ram image and kernel, and is the only one marked bootable in your partition table. It's usually mounted on /boot. My guess is you accidentally deleted the line when you made your edits. Should look something like:

fdisk says that /dev/sda1 is set as the bootable partition. So it would be reasonable to assume that it contains my ram image and kernel....but upon closer analysis -- with that drive mounted using my LiveCD -- the contents of /dev/sda1 mounted as /boot show that all the files are dated from early 2010, when I was playing around with Gentoo. Check it:

smallpond: I will go ahead with your advice anyways and add this entry to my fstab:

My new fstab therefore looks like this:

I will now reboot my computer and see what happens. I will report back here with the results.

btw, the contents of /boot in my lisa partition on /dev/sda7 looks like this:

I can conclusively say that adding this to my fstab:

...doesn't allow me to get past the error I reported initially. Recovery mode still hangs at the 3 second mark. What else could I try?

Well. Not having any bootable partition seems like a problem. Shouldn't one of the others be marked bootable, then?

Not having a bootable partition does seem like a problem, yes. But my theory is that it’s separate from the problem I am having with my fstab. The initial error that I reported and the error I continue to experience despite my troubleshooting efforts is that the O/S can’t mount the root file system. My O/S loads premount init scripts and does a lot of other things which means, in my humble opinion, that it has nothing to do with GRUB. Since GRUB activates at boot allowing me to load Windows 7, Slackware 1337, Lisa and Lisa (recovery mode) I think the problem is with my fstab. If the bootable flag wasn’t set properly, as you suggest smallpond, then GRUB should be giving me one of it’s famous errors that can be found here: http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/errors.html

Maybe I really don’t know know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’re right, smallpond. Question: How would I go about marking /dev/sda7 as bootable? Answer: Using fdisk. Since /dev/sda7 is the drive which has a fresh install of 64-bit Lisa, that’s the drive I want to mark bootable. My problem is I don’t know how to use fdisk. Here are the input, output and errors I get whilst using fdisk with my LiveDVD:

What does that “Warning: partition ‘x’ has empty type” mean? And what does error 22: Invalid argument mean? I Googled it but I can’t figure out what it means. What should I try next?

I asked in ##Linux on FreeNode and a number of idlers came forward and said that you are out to lunch, smallpond. Here is the dialogue (cropped):

Your friends are correct that the Linux bootloader does not need the boot flag. However, if you have dual-boot with Windows 7, your MBR now contains the Windows bootloader. Since you don't like my information, have a look here:

http://linux.ioerror.us/2006/01/30/w...-install-grub/

"If you intend to dual-boot Windows, then you should avoid installing GRUB to the MBR. The reason for this is that Windows occasionally overwrites the MBR, for instance, when you reinstall it, and that could be quite often. When that happens, your Linux system will seem to disappear as your system starts booting directly into Windows, bypassing the boot menu altogether. To avoid this, install GRUB to the boot sector of the active partition instead."


The active partition is the one marked with the boot flag. You can use cfdisk "b" command to set this.

Have you checked that the UUID's correspond to the devices? Some installers re-format swap, for instance, and change the UUID in the process. And maybe you should check them in grub.cfg also. Also make sure you have ro in the kernel line, or linux line, since it's grub2.

After bashing my head against the wall for several days and after troubleshooting on 3 different forums and also in ##linux on FreeNode, the only solution was to reinstall Lisa. Ugh.

The experts in ##Linux hypothesized that my problem could have been ReiserFS related, so I went with ext4 upon reinstall. No problems so far.