Disk Issues

Larry Hartman larryhartman50 at bellsouth.net
Wed Jul 11 02:14:57 UTC 2007


On Tuesday 10 July 2007 09:38:22 pm Larry Hartman wrote:
> 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

I was correct.....this turned out to be a very basic issue.  I ran parted from 
command line and it gave me a hint by naming the single harddrive as (sda).  
So I renamed my hda3 and hda4 to sda3 and sda4 in the fstab:

hda1 / ext3
hda2 swap
sda3 /home ext3
sda4 /media/sda4 ext3

Now all works normally....except I am left with a question as to why the 
kernel accepts hda1 and hda2 rather than sda1 and sda2?  And should I change 
these to sda1/2, or will changing them cause me further complications?

Who needs a virus when I am around?

Larry




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