Boot lockup

[Rick Stevens]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 23:16 -0500, Dan Hunter wrote:
> I have a PC with Fedora Core 5 on it.
> I boot from disk 1 ( hda )
> hda1 = /boot
> hda2 = /
> hda3 = swap
>  
> I have two additional drives
> hdc1 = /mnt/raid
> hdc2 = /mnt/raid2
>  
> hard drive number 3 crashed.
> When the drive crashed, the system rebooted.
> Or we lost power, crashing the system, and the drive failed.
> Either way, I have a dead drive and a system that refuses to boot
> without that drive.
>  
> I have a replacement drive, ready to installed.
> But I can't get the machine to boot up.
> It gives an error when trying to mount /mnt/raid2
> I get the option of making changes, but / is a read-only file system.
> I can't change fstab.
>  
> I tried putting a loading FC5 on a new disk and then mounting the old
> boot disk.
> But every time the PC boots, it winds up with the same mount error.
> I specified booting from Primary master, Primary slave, Secondary
> master, Secondary slave, normal, and drive C:.
> It starts out on the new boot drive and then, some how, winds up on
> the old boot drive and errors out.
>  
> I tried hitting the "I" during the boot process.
>  
> I don't know what to do next.

The most correct thing is to boot in rescue mode off either CD #1, the
rescue CD or the DVD.  At the "boot:" prompt, enter "rescue" and press
ENTER.  When the system asks if you want the system disk mounted, select
"Yes".

When the "#" prompt comes back, the root filesystem of the crashed
system will be mounted at /mnt/sysimage.  Edit "/mnt/sysimage/etc/fstab"
and comment out the lines referring to "/mnt/raid" and "/mnt/raid2" and
save the file.  At the command prompt, enter "exit" and the system will
pop out the CD/DVD and reboot.  The original system should come up
WITHOUT trying to mount the crashed disk.

This is precisely the type of thing that rescue mode is meant to do.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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