[K12OSN] Help! Added 2nd drive and edited fstab = no boot

[John Lucas]

On Thursday 18 January 2007 16:18, Petre Scheie wrote:
> John Lucas wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 January 2007 13:39, Jim Christiansen wrote:
> >> OK, I fouled up...  I've just formatted the second drive to a classroom
> >> server then edited fstab adding:
> >>
> >> LABEL=/home2            /home2                  ext3    defaults       
> >> 1 2
> >>
> >> Now the system won't bopot and just drops to the shell.  You know- type
> >> control d or enter password for file system check...
> >>
> >> How do I mount the root file system rw??  I can nano /etc/fstab, but it
> >> is read only.
> >
> > Try this to mount your root partition r/w from single-user mode:
> >
> > 	mount -o remount rw /
> >
> > I would check to make sure you can mount the new drive manually before
> > putting it in your fstab. Once you can do that, unmount it, edit fstab
> > and mount it with a simple: mount /home2 command, and *then* try
> > rebooting. Any mistakes should turn up for correction without affecting
> > the rest of the machine.
> >
> > I am old fashioned, but I prefer to use the device designation
> > (i.e. /dev/sdb1) instead of relying on a label that is subject to
> > duplication, typos, and corruption. But that's just me.
>
> I recently asked someone from Red Hat why the preference for partition
> labels in fstab rather than the actual device names (I, too, prefer device
> names instead of labels).  He said that as pluggable devices become more
> common, such as USB disks and sticks, it cannot always be guaranteed that
> /dev/sdb3 will be the third partition on the second SCSI disk.  With the
> advent of SATA drives, which appear as /dev/sd* devices, one can foresee a
> day when all storage is a /dev/sd* device.  With labels, which are written
> to the device, hot plugging and unplugging of devices won't interfere with
> the OS disks. All of which makes sense to me, so I've been trying to get in
> the habit of using labels.
>

That makes sense for a workstation or laptop, but on a server with primarily 
fixed drives, it seems less persuasive to me.

-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
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