Disk Issues

[Larry Hartman]

On Tuesday 10 July 2007 08:13:00 pm Derek Broughton wrote:
> Larry Hartman wrote:
> > I have a single hard drive partitioned 4 ways:
> >
> > /dev/hda1  as  /
> > /dev/hda2  as swap
> > /dev/hda3  as /home ext3
> > /dev/hda4  as /media/hda4 vfat
> >
> > When booting I receive an fsck error telling me that the kernel does not
> > recognize /dev/hda3 and /dev/hda4  master boot records and then goes into
> > Recovery mode as root.
> >
> > I can do a shutdown -r now and it proceeds to boot into KDM, but can not
> > log
> > in because KDE does not find my home directories.   /etc/fstab file looks
> > clean.
> >
> > Need some suggestions to trace this out.  I have had this error before
> > and ended up reloading....don't think it is necessary but do not know
> > enough to fix it.
>
> It shouldn't _care_ about "boot" records on hda3 and hda4.  I'd start by
> commenting out hda3 and hda4 in your fstab.  Does it boot normally (albeit,
> without your /home partition)?
>
> If not, the real problem would seem to be on /, or with your grub
> configuration that simply isnt looking at hda1 (but that seems unlikely, or
> you'd never get there).
>
> If that works fine, then (a) what's your fstab look like and (b) what's
> your partition table look like (output from any of the partition tools will
> do). --
> derek

Derek:

I already commented out hda3 and hda4...that allows me to get to KDM without 
going through the rigors of the recovery mode.  I agree that this is not a / 
or grub issue....I can login in and run commands via TTYs, etc.  X server 
appears to be working.  I just can not get a working KDE login.

The fstab is pretty vanilla, the essentials are above.  I do nothing special 
with fstab on my install.   I did insert the Dapper live CD and ran gparted.  
gparted sees all of the drives--all looks clean there.  

I reformatted hda4 to ext3 file system and changed line in fstab to reflect 
the change (removed the vfat related options).  Afterwards I ran a sudo 
mount -a and got the following error:

mount:  special device /dev/hda3 does not exist
mount:  special device /dev/hda4 does not exist

Looks like something pretty fundamental that I haven't thought of.

I looked into the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory and see four alpha-numeric 
entries...I assume these correspond to uuid's for each partition?  Should I 
replace my fstab entries with these?

Good thing this is a spare machine.

Larry