Why can't mount /dev/sda during boot?

[erislover]

So, I have a 160gb sata hard drive that is going to be my /home. Indeed, it is my /home right now, but only after some serious troubles.

1) First, hard drive. BIOS sees it, OS sees it.
2) fdisk, one primary partition (sda1)
3) mke2fs -j /dev/sda1 -- nothing wrong here.
4) edit fstab for a /foo, make /foo directory, mount /dev/sda1
5) mounts fine, copy /home/. /foo/., copies fine.
6) edit fstab to make sda mount as /home and hdb6 mount as /foo
7) reboot, enter hell

OK, not really hell, but during boot I get this message:

fsck 1.37 (some date)
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains... blah blah blah

So, I strongly believe the device is valid and it describes a correct ext2 filesystem, given 1-7 above.

At the prompt, I log in as root and edit /etc/fstab. If I change fstab to put my old home back, and mount /dev/sda1 as /foo, everything is fine. Except that /dev/sda1 isn't mounted at /foo. Once I log in, I can mount it fine. df shows the right size. ls -a shows the right files for a /home directory. This is a valid device and a valid filesystem.

So this time I edit fstab to mount /dev/sda1 as /home knowing it won't work anyway and reboot. Enter hell, tell the devil to go on, and log in as root instead of me. Mount /home. Home mounts successfully. Log out, log in as me, and here I am wondering what I have to do to get this to work right.

It seems that at the time it tries loading all the devices, whatever software isn't ready to deal with /dev/sda1. But I cannot find out how to do anything about this. Help, please! I hope I have given enough info.

[devils casper]

Hi !!!

post fstab file.........




.... casper ....

[erislover]

Sure.

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/hdb1       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
#/dev/hdb6       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
/dev/hdb7       /wlshare        vfat    rw,user,owner,exec   0       2
/dev/hdb5       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sda1       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

[devils casper]

Hi !!!

/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

umask number should be 0

/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 0


.... casper ....

[devils casper]

Hi !!!

/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

umask number should be 0

/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 0


.... casper ....

[erislover]

Well, that stops the error from happening, but /home still won't mount. I need to log in as root, mount, log out, then log in as me.

[erislover]

To make sure that the message during boot wasn't lying to me, I disabled mounting of /dev/sda1 (new home) and /dev/hdb6 (old home). I repartitioned the disk with fdisk, reformatted with mke2fs -j, copied (old home) to (new home) (as cp -ia /home/. /foo/. ), and ran fsck:

# fsck -fv /dev/sda1
fsck 1.37 (21-Mar-2005)
e2fsck 1.37 (21-Mar-2005)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

   15364 inodes used (0%)
      12 non-contiguous inodes (0.1%)
         # of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 740/24/0
  799072 blocks used (2%)
       0 bad blocks
       0 large files

   13908 regular files
    1436 directories
       0 character device files
       0 block device files
       0 fifos
       0 links
      11 symbolic links (11 fast symbolic links)
       0 sockets
--------
   15355 files

Still won't mount. Is this because the driver for my mobo's SATA chipset isn't loaded at the time this check is being done?

[erislover]

Indeed, the proper driver for the chipset wasn't being loaded. I tracked down the problem to /etc/modules which didn't indicate the proper driver. After adding sata_via to the configuration and rebooting, everything is fine.