Hi there.

I'm having a bit of a trouble installing gentoo on my pc. I managed to put a rather lame misspell in my fstab....

/dev/hda1 /boot noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda2 none sw 0 0
/dec/hda3 / noauto 0 1

...as you can see I've put dec insted of dev on hda3 and now when I boot up i get the message

"The superblok could not be read or does not describe...."

It enables me to log in as root (or as a regular user pressing Ctrl+D), upon doing that and editing the fstab I get the error

"Could not open file for writing, read only file system"

from nano when I try saving (note, I'm loged on as root). I suppose there is a fairly simple way around this... or maybe not??


Thanks in advance!

Try using a bootdisk to get into linux. Then mount /dev/hda3. Once it's mounted you should be able to modify files.

as root, unmount the file system (if possible) and then remount it with read-write privileges

if it is not possible to do that, use something like knoppix, or the distro's recovery cd to edit the file

if you have windows lying around, you could even use explore2fs to get into the partition and edit the fstab file that way

*actually, you can pass the correct device for your / (root) partition on the kernel boot line for either lilo or grub

What filesystem is /etc on? You could conceivably be at a command prompt on another filesystem besides /etc and

umount /dev/partition_with_etc
mount -t ext2 /dev/partition_with_etc /etc

This should give you write access to the drive that has fstab. I don't really understand your second line in fstab, though. What is hda2, why "none" and why the 's'?

Thanks guys, after struggling with various mount/umount parameters/situations and at a last try be for format & reinstall, it fell trough.
I booted up on the Gentoo LiveCD, mounted /dev/hda3 to /mnt/gentoo and was from there (/mnt/gentoo/etc) able to edit/correct fstab and save and everything boot's up beautifully now

This is my second ever Linux install, done one RH9, so there is a lot of "man howdoesthisf*****gcommandwork" going on so sorry for my novice newbie post.
Now i just have to build some KDE on top of this (btw, is it possible to change where emerge downloads it's packages from, some settings file or something)


PS
That second line should have been
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
And honestly, i don’t know what the 's' is for, I'm just following the manual