February 02, 2008 3:09 PM
Linux Rescue
Recently I had a hard drive die on me, I knew it was dead but I still went ahead and rebooted. Which meant of course that when it appeared in fstab it immeditaley threw the machine into a tizzie. So i tried 'emacs /etc/fstab' from the command line but only got a read-only version, and I got the same when I tried using vim. So I was scuppered.
I tried using knoppix as a live distro to enable me to edit fstab but it couldn't see inside my lvm drives.
And then I found my centos 5.0 installation disk and was able to gain access to fstab via Linux Rescue, using the mantra of 'mount/sysimage/etc/fstab'. Then it was easy to just comment out the relevant line and then save and reboot. But to the centos developers, please, don't put light grey writing on a black background, its virtually unreadable! To read it I had to turn off the main light and read it just with the back light screen monitor.
I tried using knoppix as a live distro to enable me to edit fstab but it couldn't see inside my lvm drives.
And then I found my centos 5.0 installation disk and was able to gain access to fstab via Linux Rescue, using the mantra of 'mount/sysimage/etc/fstab'. Then it was easy to just comment out the relevant line and then save and reboot. But to the centos developers, please, don't put light grey writing on a black background, its virtually unreadable! To read it I had to turn off the main light and read it just with the back light screen monitor.