newbie in trouble - recovering fstab

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 10:10:40PM +0100, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> > /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?
The out of space error happened to me recently and sure enough when I
booted into single user mode an execution of df showed I was indeed
out of space. You are either booting from the wrong partition, have
stuff on the wrong drive or something like that. Do a df and see what
the space situation is.
-- 

=======================================================================
Today is the first day of the rest of the mess.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu