I recently installed GENTOO 1.4RC5 on an old UltraSparc station. After hours and hours of work, it was working fine. However, I made the mistake of trying the "auto" option in fstab and now it is corrupt. I boot into maintenance mode and try the "mount -n -o remount,rw /" command but all I get is a message that says "you must specify the filesystem type". When I try adding a "-t ext2" in there, all I get is the help menu. Can someone tell me how to fix my fstab? Another two-day install and kernel burn would really be aggravating.

Try booting from the installaiton disk, mount the drive and then edit the fstab with nano.

Example:

1. Boot from the first CD.
2. mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo ( assuming /root is on /dev/hda3 )
3. cd /mnt/gentoo/etc; nano -w fstab
4. Do your editing.
5. umount //mnt/gentoo
6. Reboot the system and boot from hard drive

Good luck.