My first post here, be gentle!

I am trying to mount a partition at boot time. The distro that I am using is MontaVista which is booting off of a FlashDrive on a rather bare-ish board with a PPC 405. The HD is connected via IDE. I think I did all the fdisk and mkfs stuff correctly. During boot I get a message like this (by the way, if it matters, I am interfacing with the board via HyperTerminal on a Win2k machine):

Mounting local filesystems...
mount: you didn't specify a filesystem type for /dev/hdc3
I will try all types mentioned in /etc/filesystems or /proc/filesystems
Trying msdos
mount: special device /dev/hdc3 does not exist



The entry in fstab is this:

/dev/hdc3 /mnt/hd auto auto,sync,rw,exec 0 2



And the part that confuses me the most is that I can mount it after booting with no complaints:

root@ml310:~# mount (see what's mounted)
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
root@ml310:~# mount -a (mount everything in fstab)
root@ml310:~# mount (now see that it actually mounted hd3)
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdc3 on /mnt/hd type ext2 (rw,sync)



Any advice? I can tell you other stuff if it helps diagnose the problem. I am very new to this... thanks in advance.

The entry in fstab is this:
/dev/hdc3 /mnt/hd auto auto,sync,rw,exec 0 2

You don't specify the file system type in your fstab.

You may also want to add owner, user or users to allow who is allowed to mount it. Manually that would be something like.

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc3 /mnt/hd auto users rw exec 0 2

You can get info on commands in the man pages
At a konsole or shell type (for the mount command)
man mount
also
mount --help

Thanks for the reply. For the filesystem type I have 'auto'... not good enough? Also, mount works fine after booting with that given fstab entry. Anything else to look for/try?

According to your mount command output, /dev/hdc3 uses the ext2 file system.

Change the 'auto' in the 3rd column of your fstab entry to 'ext2'.

I would prefer using ext3 over ext2 myself. If you haven't stored anything on it yet, you may want to change it.

Ok, I had tried changing it to ext2 before, but tried again to get the following output during boot:


Checking all file systems...
fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
fsck.ext2: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda1
/dev/hda1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>


fsck failed. Please repair manually.

CONTROL-D will exit from this shell and continue system startup.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):




After continuing normal startup and logging on, the first thing I did (for illustration of my frustration) was mount (to display), mount -a (to mount everything), then mount again to display what's there. Here is what I got:

root@ml310:~# mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
root@ml310:~# mount -a
root@ml310:~# mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /mnt/hd type ext2 (rw,sync)



It is fine mounting it after booting. Help!
In response to using ext3 instead of ext2, I don't see how to set that in fdisk. The only options are things like "Linux" or "Linux swap", no actual ext2 or ext2 options. Am I missing something? Is it just this distro (MontaVista)? Any further advice appreciated!

Nobody?

The fdisk program only sets up the partition. The /sbin/mkfs.ext3 program actually creates the file system.

Here is a webpage with a step-by-step guide on exactly what you want to do.

http://www.idevelopment.info/data/Un...ive_ext3.shtml
I'm not sure if the 4096 block size is what you want. Try to find out what it is for your other ext3 partition and use the same thing.

You might want to punt and start over.

Can you post any links on the board and the MontaVista home page?

Just a SWAG but it sounds similar to some distros and trying to mount USB drives at boot. When the OS attempts to mount the drive via the fstab the modules are not loaded yet and therefore the device does not exist yet. Of course once the system is fully booted you can manually mount the drive.

If this distro uses an intrd (initial ram disk) you can add the IDE module or you can recompile the kernel with IDE support. I haven't played around with the boot process to be able to tell you how to load the modules prior to mounting partitons via fstab.

Thanks for the link. It goes through all the steps I have already taken though. Except I used mkfs instead of mkfs.ext3 . Sounds like michaelk might be a little closer to what the prob might be. I suspect for some reason the OS doesn't know about my HD yet and can't mount it (because it does mount after boot just fine). IS there a way for me to check if that is the case? Can I look at some sort of boot log somewhere that would shed some light? Any more advice? I am very grateful for any tips...I wouldn't want to mess with the CompactFlash that came with the OS loaded (with other things as well). Maybe in a couple months I might be so bold!

Michael, I am not sure what you were asking about MontaVista/board website? It is a Xilinx board: ML310 . But there isn't much direct help about Linux issues there. The MontaVista website wasn't too useful to me either.

Thanks again for any further advice...

Just curious on what type of embedded board you were using.

See if you have a /var/log/messages file. This might show some messages as well as the output of the dmesg command.

I wouldn't know how much an embedded distro varies from an Intel PC distro.

In most "regular" distros there is a /etc/rc.local boot script which is the last to execute. A simple fix if this exists would be to add the mount command to this file.

There is a messages file... it is pretty big and seems to have all kinds of junk in it, not sure what I am looking for there.

The closest thing resembling what you mention is a directory called rc.d in etc. Its contents look like this:

root@ml310:/etc# cd rc.d
root@ml310:/etc/rc.d# ls
init.d rc0.d rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d rc4.d rc5.d rc6.d rcS.d

Any ideas where I might poke to find where to add a mount command? Or any other ideas? Thanks again...

rc.local is a file in the /etc directory. rcx.d should be directories.

Nothing named rc.local in etc (or anywhere else as far as I can tell). What tells Linux (on a reg. distro) to run the commands in this file? Can I make a mod there that runs mount as the last thing before login?

My suggestion to start over refered to the hard drive partitioning and formatting and not the entire installation. What version of MontaVista are you using. Before version 1.2, the ext3 filesystem wasn't supported, but the reiserfs was. Perhaps you could try using reiserfs instead.

Another Idea is to look in the manpage for 'ld.so.conf' and 'ld.conf'.
If the ext3 filesystem support is a module rather than being built into the kernel, then an entry in /etc/ld.so.preload may cause the ext3 kernel module to be loaded before the drives are mounted.

If this doesn't work, you may need to produce an initrd file containing the kernel module.