Suse boot problem after hardware upgrade/change
 

Hi all
I don't know much about Linux booting as I just, well, use the system and the time has come to upgrade my hardware.
I changed the motherboard, processor, RAM, GFX card and (I think the most important thing for my problem) - I dropped 2 hard drives and added 1 new hard drive.
Now when I try to boot the system, I get thrown out to sh with the messages that end with :
Now I gather that the disk order is probably messing about with the system (though I'm a bit :confused: with the mouse bit in there), but can any of you experts tell me how to go about fixing this problem?

Thanks in advance.
Oh and I did try to search but couldn't find the thread that would deal with this type of the problem. If I missed it, then I apologize.

you will need to edit your /etc/fstab file to match your current configuration. use a text editor like pico or nano to do that.

Hm, sorry if I will sound a bit stupid ( :o ) , but I cannot run either pico or nano (the system does not find them) and the /etc/fstab file doesn't exist.
I don't know, but it seems I get thrown out into very basic shell (and I never worked in it - that's where the stupid comes from :) ).
As I mentioned it says : exiting to /bin/sh , and I don't have a clue what it means by this :o
Any more tips on how to approach this?

One more thing I found out though : When I typed "exit" in this /bin/shell thingy, it started to crounch errors in style "couldn't mount dev/hd2", and something about it being a designated as a system drive or root drive or something. And then it threw a kernel panic and hang the computer.

it sounds like maybe your root filesystem was on one of the hard drives you took out.

First, thanks for keep trying to help
Now, I'm sure the HD that got Suse installed is still in the box. I took out data disk and disk that got XP installed on it (so no chance it holding suse root system). :confused:

what did you type to find out that /etc/fstab doesn't exist?
Is the hard drive with suse on the same device as it was?
If it was on the secondary master, it still needs to be.
Did you take off 2 parallel ide drives and add a new serial ata?

and the fstab didn't show on the list
That could be the problem yes, but how to go about solving it? :o
That's exactly what I did...

If you just have the one parallel cable hooked up to the linux hard drive, which i doubt, put the motherboard end of the cable in other ide socket. If you have a second cable with just a dvd burner or similar on it, then switch the sockets that the 2 cables are connected to on the motherboard.

Again a newbie-sh answer follows, but I opened the box and there is only 1 IDE socket (at least it's only 1 socket of the type the Suse disk is connected to if that makes any sense).
Is there any chance you can "tell" the system that the order (or whatever) of the disks changed, without going through re-install? (because the re-install option seems to be on horizon, although I really don't want to do that).

boot the suse cdrom in rescue mode.
I don't know what that's going to look like.
the file, /etc/fstab, it's short for filesystems table, needs to be edited to reflect the way it's set up now.
you can list all the partitions with the command fdisk -l.
the rescue disk should mount the partition. hopefully it will tell you where. which version of suse are you using?

if you give up, you can probably get a slightly newer suse, and use the upgrade option.

10.1

Will try playing with rescue mode a bit, but if I give up, then maybe I'll even switch to Etch as I've been tempted to do so anyway. It's just that all my work is set on that Suse system and that's why I've been, ehm, hesitating.

I've got the opensuse 10.2 dvd. I'll boot it and see what rescue mode has.

i booted the open suse 10.2 dvd in rescue mode.
i logged in as root.
listed all the partitions with fdisk -l
mounted the linux partition with mount /dev/hda5 /mnt

the only text editors i could find were joe and vim, which are both really tough to use.

you could run
joe /mnt/etc/fstab

I'm going to guess that your root partition is /dev/hdc1, which you may change to hda1, or whatever the drive letter and number you mounted.