Corrupted fstab

[pfeigl]

Hello all. I shut down my machine after it was on for about a week and it would not boot. I booted off the CD and found that fstab was corrupted. I edited the file. Saved with:wq! and checked it again and it was good. I rebooted and fstab was corrupted again and all my edits were lost. If anyone has any idea what the heck is going on I would be very grateful.
:drown:

[Jonathan183]

You did change fstab on the hard drive rather than /etc/fstab for the CD?
Can you post fstab for your hard drive.

[pfeigl]

Hi. We meet again.. The only entry is for proc. I had to create the entries for the HDD etc and they just get blown away every time I reboot. Except the /proc entry. It stays OK for some reason.

Peter

[Jonathan183]

Hi Peter ...
I got round to installing slackware eventually ... I get an fstab like this

root@ubuntu:~# mkdir /manmount
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda12 /manmount
root@ubuntu:~# cat /manmount/etc/fstab
/dev/sda5        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
/dev/sda12       /                ext3        defaults         1   1
/dev/sda7        /home            ext3        defaults         1   2
/dev/sda15       /Gentoo-root     ext3        defaults         1   2
/dev/sda2        /Windows-Vista   ntfs        ro               1   0
/dev/sda4        /NTFS-data       ntfs        ro               1   0
#/dev/cdrom      /mnt/cdrom       auto        noauto,owner,ro  0   0
/dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto        noauto,owner     0   0
devpts           /dev/pts         devpts      gid=5,mode=620   0   0
proc             /proc            proc        defaults         0   0
root@ubuntu:~#

Can you post equivalent when you boot from the live CD?

[pfeigl]

Here is the entire fstab file:

BOF
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
EOF

Peter

[Jonathan183]

Thats exactly what I get for /etc/fstab if I boot from slackware12 cd1. Just to be clear about the process you are going through ...
boot from slackware cd 1 & login as root then type

mkdir /manmount
mount /dev/sda1 /manmount
vi /manmount/etc/fstab

You modify the contents of the fstab and save changes
You can do

cat /manmount/etc/fstab

and it shows your modifications. But after a reboot the changes are lost.

[pfeigl]

Yes manmount does an admirable job of creating an fstab file, but like we hav e both seen, the changes are for nought...

Let me know if you have a brainwave...

Thanks, Peter

[Jonathan183]

If you go through the same process and then

cp /manmount/etc/fstab /manmount/etc/fstabback

does the fstabback file exist after you reboot?
Are you using

umount /dev/sda1

before the reboot?

[pfeigl]

The .bak file gets wiped out completely. The regular fstab is as usual (buggered up) and no I haven't been umounting sda1 but it does not seem to matter.

Peter

[pfeigl]

OK. I got a live Sllax CD. What shall I do with it?
Peter