newbie in trouble - recovering fstab

[Mark Weaver]

Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> well, i've gone and done it now. Somehow while I tried to find a way
> of moving my /home directory to a partition of it's own everything is
> f**ed up.
> 
> I was looking into moving /home because it'd run completely out of
> space on the ext3 part where everythingis (i hope!)
> 
> As part of that i must have typed something wrong because in my
> atempts to copy /home from the command line - i ended up copying /
> (everything) which naturally ran out of space and stopped everything
> working...
> 
> Somehow trying to edit in vi from the command line, instead of saving
> an edited fstab, supposed to mount the new partition, i managed to
> truncate it 0kb - it's empty. So now I can't get anything to start.
> 
> I can get the command line in rescue mode, or single user mode by
> editing the grub config. I notice also that fstab~ is still there -
> but i can't work out how to copy it to fstab.
> 
> Heeellllp ...
> 
> Yours sincerely, A. Twerp
> Stupidville
> ( Duncan )
> 
> :-)
> 
> (luckily i never uninstalled XP - so I can ask for help...)
> 

Sounds like you're having a rather active Monday morning, eh? no worries...

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

now you'll want to cd to /mnt/sysimage/etc where your fstab~ file 
located. Once you're there issue this command to rename fstab~ to fstab:

	mv fstab~ fstab

Or you could do a more safe copy of the file by using this command:

	cp -vf fstab~ fstab

Let us know how you make out. If you can get your system back up there 
is an easy way to move partition such as /home to another disk. I don't 
remember if I posted that solution to this list or not, but if you'd 
like to know how I did it let me know and I'll post the information.

-- 
Mark
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