I am new to Ubuntu and (v 8.10). Stupidly fiddling around with fstab I changed something and when I rebooted the x server would not start (some internal error)

I believe this is because I changed fstab, and so the drive is read only. I can access the partition from ubuntu installed in windows but cannot change the file. How do I sort out the permissions?

Here is fstab, i assume the bold part is the issue:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda5
UUID=57c0e8f9-2bd6-4fd4-bcfc-5f715a62ce88 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro.data=writeback.noatime 0 1
# /dev/sda6
UUID=4ac2ff64-16d4-4fd2-bb24-10bc10a94467 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0


my partition is /dev/sda5

Any help greatly appreciated!

I am not sure if this is your problem with X, but yes that entry is borked. Those periods should be commas. And I think relatime and noatime are mutually exclusive. I.e. you want at most only one of them. (I've also wondered whether the data=writeback was originally in there or if that is one of your modifications. Not that there is anything wrong with it if that is what you want.) So I think what you probably want on that line is:

By the way, don't appologize for "fiddling around with fstab." We learn by breaking things and then fixing them. However, before altering any system files like fstab, it is prudent to back up the original file. That way if you do break something you can always go back to where you started.