ok here's what happened
got an external drive ( 1.5 seagate w/ vantec enclosure)
esata directly into motherboard with external power supply

using lvm went to format the durn thing

chug-chug screen blank (probably just big drive)

I thought maybe the program froze

exit program

turn off enclosure

reboot

now Fedora 8-64 wont start says my fstab is horked
wont let me edit the fstab says read only no root

when it restarted it looked for the new drive sdc ( which was still off )
de faulted to the
(repair Filesystem)# prompt

i thought it wanted to repair it so i typed yes at the prompt
which started a run of "y"'s down the screen till i rebooted again
I can see my install but cannot edit the fstab to ignore the drive

obviously i turned the drive on and plugged it back in only to have it complain bout the swap not initializing

can anyone help?

thanks

If you can reboot and get to the (repair Filesystem)# prompt, I think (and I'm going from memory here) that your mounted filesystem is still your initrd.

If your root filesystem is on LVM, you need to do a few things. (If it's not this won't work. Let me know if that's the case.)

First, you need to pvscan, vgscan, possibly vgchange -ay, then lvscan to see if the logical volumes are available. If running off the initial ramdisk filesystem, those commands aren't directly available. You have to 'lvm pvscan', 'lvm vgscan', etc.

When you get to the point where the 'lvm lvscan' shows your root filesystem logical volume is active, you can mount it and edit /etc/fstab.

So you could "mkdir /m", 'mount /dev/<volumegroup>/<rootlogicalvolume> /m', then 'vi /m/etc/fstab' to remove the offending line. Reboot and you should be ok.

This is all from memory, so I hope my recall is good. Good luck. Post your results, good or bad.

Thanks Tommy

I had looked at my fstab before i horked it

i was able to read the file during the recovery but not edit

I could See the offending entry but couldn't touch it

dang

loaded the recovery cd

chose rescue

got to the " sh-3# " prompt

Read this
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO...ng_linux_cdrom

section 2.2

# df

to see what I had

# chroot /mnt/SYSIMAGE

# ls

to see where I'm at

# cd etc/

# vim fstab

I see the line again

"i"

to write in vi

it is now read/write

edit out offending line about new harddrive

"esc" :wq!

cntrl+d twice

my box is back

now i must read up on formatting and mounting external hard drives before attempting to install that thing again

again thanks Tommy

Really excellent work, and easier than my suggestion.