Bit of a BIG boot problem
 

Hi there,

I was happily working on my Slackware and rebooted. When the system tried to come up it stopped halfway through after recognising the Disks...

It is saying that the file system block has a bad magic number.. or the likes. (bare with me here I am trying to remember)

It gives me the chance to go into a read only console to run e2fsck with a different block.

I am pretty sure it is because I messed up my fstab file. It does not have entries for proc or swap and the my root partition is pointing to the wrong place...

I have an old version of the fstab, but can't put it in the right place because I am on a read only filesystem... :-(

Can someone tell me how I can mount read-write to put back my fstab??

Help...

Rob

Pressed reset while working?

Well, the only way to do it is to use
a Install-floppy or CD to boot the box...

Once it's up, find the hdxX you're after
using fdisk -l /dev/hdx ...

Then mount it manually:
Not sure whether the boot-shell
of the Slack CD has vi or not, worst
case is you'll have to find it on the
mounted HD and run it from there to
edit your fstab...

Cheers,
Tink

It definately does. I've used it enough in the past several days to be sure of it.

Cheers guys, thats just what I needed.

I forgot that Slackware gives you a nice shell before you start the install process. I was still thinking in Redhat terms....

Once in I simply recovered the old fstab, and voila, Slackware is working again. (I did not realise Linux uses fstab as part of the boot process to work out were root is... isn't that a bit risky? )

I did a clean reboot, the problem was caused by my own poor programming efforts in C++.

I think I should stick to the rule, if it aint broken don't break it...

Thanks again

Rob

It's not risky if people don't do
their experiments as root, mate ;)

There's a REASON why everybody
screams "Create a normal user account,
don't use root for everyday work!"

Cheers,
Tink

.... hmmm

it's a bit difficult to write out the fstab file without being root (I supose I could go down the route of sudoers etc)....

But hey cheers anyway

Rob