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

[Petre Scheie]

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.

Petre