[Cooker] diskdrake prob followed by maint session problem with solution

[John Danielson, II]

Soemthing that just happened to me made me think that documenting a particular recovery process would help many people:

How to get your /etc/fstab file editted from a floppy boot when your partitioning is set up to have a seperate /usr part:

Go into maintenance shell, as the e2fsck fails due to it thinking from the /etc/fstab that a partition is /dev/hda5 when it is /dev/hda6 (or some such radically wrong number, part 5 should always be the extended part table).

type

/bin/cat /etc/fstab

find which part has /usr and mount it

now type

/usr/vi /etc/fstab

OR type

/usr/emacs-nox /etc/fstab

comment out the offending part spec.

POINT, you might be dropped in a maint shell and have a situation where your file editors are in /usr and /usr is not mounted and you need to figure out what part /usr is on to mount it.

SUGGESTION:

Stick an editor in /bin and document which one it is(vi would work, if man were accessible easily from a / only mounting in a maint shell). Most newbies do not know what usually is in the part of the / subtree on / part by default and quite a few read the NGs and are told to separate out /usr.

I am also printing this for myself.

Just a thought, but could flesh out the procedure if wanted for newbie to know how to edit /etc/fstab from what a floppy boot drops to when an unrecoverable bad superblock error is triggered by diskdrake assigning /dev/hda5 to first extended part and not allowing for the extended part table(and then erroring as it is created, but still offering to write the /etc/fstab, which I did let it do last night at 1 AM). diskdrake defaults optional things like /cookermirror to extended\logical type, but fails to set up an exclusion of part 5 for the extended part table and writes a /dev/hda5 entry in /etc/fstab for the new part if it is the first logical created on a physical disk-- sheesh. Then it decides the extended part table has a bad superblock because is trying to use it as a partition that can be read to and written to directly.

John.