newbie in trouble - recovering fstab

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 19:22 +0100, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> Mark, thanks for the reply
> 
> > Boot your rescue CD, go to the command prompt and mount your disk. When
> > the disk is mounted chroot with this command:
> > 
> >         chroot /mnt/sysimage
> In trying to boot in linux rescue from CD1 I get:
> "An error occured trying to mount some or all of your system. Some of
> it may be mounted under /mnt/sysimage"
> 
> But when I look in /mnt all there is is "/runtime" and "/source" no
> "/sysimage". Naturally enough
> # mount /mnt/sysimage
> doesn't work (can't remember the exact error message - something about
> /mnt/sysimage not existing)

/mnt/sysimage does not exist because it was not created.  Rescue did not
know what information to use and since it did not find the system it
halted before creating the mount point
.
> 
> So, I'm not getting very far yet...
> 
> Duncan
> 
The rescue procedure uses /etc/fstab to know where to mount stuff.

You will need to know which partition contains /etc (the one you used
as / ).
to find that out, when in rescue mode, first run 
"fdisk -l /devb/hdX" (where hdX is the drive containing your
installation)

Then you can do the following steps to get fstab back

1. mkdir /mnt/sysimage
2. mount /dev/hdX /mnt/sysimage
3. ls /mnt/sysimage (to verify you have the proper partition mounted)
4. cd /mnt/sysimage/etc
5. mv fstab~ fstab
   (or use cp to make sure you still have the backup)
then you can do what ever you needed to do to edit it and make it
proper.

BTW,  from your description this should not have happened (except for
the fstab issue_ _unless_ you used mv instead of cp to copy the stuff
from home to home.  In that case all bets are off until the details are
better known and we can provide additional guidance.