newbie in trouble - recovering fstab

[Duncan Lithgow]

> /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
I thought that might be why

> 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)
That went fine.
 
> 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.
That went fine too. I have now copied the fstab~ file to the fstab
file. That should have got me back to where I started - a full /home
directory but basically a working system. (no, i didn't use mv instead
of cp last time)

BUT:
When I then reboot it goes quite a long way through, including the
little graphical progress bar... Then:

"GDM could not write a new authorisation entry to disk. Possible out
of diskspace. Error: No space left on device."

So I shut down, on the way down I noticed that "halt" and "kill" fail
on HAL, SMB and NMB - does that tell us anything?

Restart in single user mode and go looking for that fstab file. Yup,
it's there and looks like it used to - so whaddup wi dat?