machine will no longer boot

[Mike Jeays]

On Monday 28 May 2007 12:05, WarrenHead wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Yesterday I installed a new sata disk into my server, which is connected
> to a highpoint rocket raid card. I plugged in only one disk, so no raid
> yet.
>
> I ran sysinstall and then fdisk and disklabel. All was fine and I placed
> files onto the disk. Then I realized I had made a mistake, I had made
> only one partition with fdisk, and two slices with disklabel.
> (Mountpoints pointing to /mnt/x  and /mnt/y.)
> Somehow I got another mountpoint automatically which mounted the entire
> disk as one, to /media/z. Weird.
>
> So I ran sysinstall again and used fdisk to erase everything and create
> two partitions. I wrote these changes successfully to the disk.
>
> I then started disklabel (still from within sysinstall) and created the
> two mount points for the two partitions again.
> I tried to write these changes to the disk, but that failed.
>
> Mmm, weird. So, perhaps I needed to reboot first?
> Which I did, and now I cannot boot anymore.
>
> The error messages that show on screen are something like this:
> Can't stat /dev/ad4sd1 No such file or directory
> Can't stat /dev/ad4se1 No such file or directory
> After that I get a bogus shell which can do virtually nothing. I have no
> idea what it is.
> I can cat /etc/fstab though and noticed that the two lines with
> mountpoints for the new disk are indeed the new lines. I guess disklabel
> was partially succesfull?
>
> Perhaps I should simply remove these lines in /etc/fstab?
> Unfortunately, with this ridiculous shell, I don't know how to.
>
> So I tried a livecd (Knoppix 5.1). Since the system disk was formatted
> as ufstype=5xbsd, I have trouble writing to it. Bummer.
>
> But... should I remove these lines in /etc/fstab? Will this matter?
>
> Luckily I can read the disk, so if necessary I can start over, but I
> hope there is something I can do from within that odd shell.
>
> Please advise, this particular problem is not fun.
>
> Cheers, Warren
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You should be able to use the antique line-editor 'ed' from the "ridiculous" 
shell.  Use Knoppix or another machine to read or write down the man pages, 
and use it to delete the lines from fstab.

You might also be able to use 'sed' from the command line to change the 
offending lines to comments, or delete them.

-- 
Mike Jeays
http://www.jeays.ca