[ubuntu-za] Problems with fstab

Mon Jun 15 15:02:44 UTC 2020

As far as swaps go. sudo blkid | grep "swap" gives me

/dev/sda5: UUID="1c5e43a0-097c-4d68-90df-e544497323dd" TYPE="swap"
PARTUUID="00023991-05"

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 16:49, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Bruce and others,
>
> Thanks for your responses so far. I suspect that Bruce is pointing me in
> the right direction. After the install, I had a lot of trouble getting the
> machine to boot. I am not sure how to relate the disks described by the
> BIOS setup to the disks that I have partitioned.
>
> I have Gigabyte UEFI DualBios 2011.
>
> My boot option 1 is 'SATA PM: ST31000524AS'
> (This works)
> Boot option 2 is 'SATA PM: ATAPI iHAS122 C'
> (When I select this, it just sits there spinning a little wheel at me.)
> Boot option 3 is 'Realtex PXE B03 D00' (I understand that has something to
> do with 'boot from LAN?)
>
> My other options would be:
> 'ubuntu'
> (The same wheel spinning)
> 'UEFI TEAM5Lite3D120G' (Which I presume is the SSD?)
> (When I select this, I get 'Media test failure, check cable
> Reboot and select proper Boot device.)
>
> You (Bruce) say: 'I think you might be booting from /dev/sda1 in MBR mode
> which has it's own /etc/fstab and is trying to mount a non existent/faulty
> root partition. The emergency error normally comes from /boot/initrd.img
> (InitRAMFS) if it is unable to hand off to the init system on disk
> (systemd).'
>
> But it does mount and run the correct root partition. It goes wrong when
> fstab tells it to mount /home.
>
> How do I go about getting bios loaded onto the SSD?
>
> Thanks for the help so far. I am learning a lot even if I am not fixing
> the problem.
>
> BIll
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 16:11, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Bruce - I need to reboot to have a look at that and will come back
>> on my other machine.
>>
>> On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 15:57, Bruce Pieterse <dev at santura.co.za> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Bill,
>>>
>>> Thanks, just wanted to make sure the obvious was covered. I think Wesley
>>> and Frans was on to something earlier.
>>>
>>> Three things I want to mention:
>>>
>>> 1. As mentioned by Wesley earlier in the thread, please make sure the
>>> BIOS is using the SSD root filesystem when booting (/dev/sdb1) and is set
>>> to UEFI mode. Generally this is marked as UEFI: ubuntu in the BIOS but can
>>> possibly vary depending on the BIOS. I think you might be booting from
>>> /dev/sda1 in MBR mode which has it's own /etc/fstab and is trying to mount
>>> a non existent/faulty root partition. The emergency error normally comes
>>> from /boot/initrd.img (InitRAMFS) if it is unable to hand off to the init
>>> system on disk (systemd).
>>> 2. You have a swap partition with UUID
>>> 1c5e43a0-097c-4d68-90df-e544497323dd enabled in /etc/fstab, but that
>>> partition doesn't exist in the output of *sudo blkid*. You can comment
>>> that line out for now. You can use a swap file instead and can be setup
>>> after you get this fixed.
>>> 3. The entry in /etc/fstab is correct, but I think the problem is point
>>> 1.
>>>
>>> Best approach is to completely, disconnect the the old hard drive and
>>> only have the SSD in and then setup the BIOS correctly, then reboot into
>>> Ubuntu. If everything is OK, shut-down, reconnect your old hard drive and
>>> boot up again.
>>>
>>> Absolutely last resort or another alternative is to rsync your /home
>>> directory from /dev/sda6 to another disk (rsync -avu /mnt/old-home/
>>> /mnt/tmp-home), format /dev/sda with just 1 ext4 partition, mount it, then
>>> rsync the contents back to the drive. This will ensure that this is no MBR
>>> on /dev/sda and is only used for /home.
>>>
>>> Let us know how it goes.
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2020-06-15 at 12:51 +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Bruce,
>>>
>>> I got 'command udo not found' until I copied it right!
>>>
>>> Here you are:
>>> /dev/sdb2: UUID="2e740efb-b15b-4bea-9ef8-a20dd7a87186" TYPE="ext4"
>>> PARTUUID="2d6e92df-4f61-489d-b490-b7494b2dac37"
>>> /dev/sda1: UUID="ea22080c-4fda-44a2-9823-b51cef829ada" TYPE="ext4"
>>> PARTUUID="00023991-01"
>>> /dev/sda6: UUID="b7092661-c008-4beb-9cdc-06c3dd036181" TYPE="ext4"
>>> PARTUUID="00023991-06"
>>> /dev/sdb1: UUID="B9BC-946C" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI System Partition"
>>> PARTUUID="26461b51-7dde-415d-bc0b-f8c93d1606a7"
>>> /dev/sdc1: LABEL="Transcend" UUID="60CC093DCC090F4A" TYPE="ntfs"
>>> PARTUUID="f2d4863e-01"
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>   Bill
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 11:06, Bruce Pieterse <dev at santura.co.za> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Bill,
>>>
>>> Please can you provide the output of *sudo blkid | grep
>>> "ext\|vfat\|ntfs" * to get a better understanding of your disks and
>>> partitions.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2020-06-15 at 09:42 +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Wesley,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply.
>>>
>>> I hope that I am talking sense here. (I am sometimes not sure that I am
>>> using the right terminology.) Going back in time, I started with only the
>>> hard disk which is now sda. I had boot, the OS, and everything else on it.
>>> Then after a couple of years I added the ssd - now sba. Now I have
>>> installed the OS on the ssd, but I still boot from my hard drive. (That is,
>>> when I did the install, I specified '/' as being on sb2.) It seems to work
>>> very well except for this problem of not being able to use fstab to specify
>>> where /home is.
>>>
>>> At the moment, I am manually mounting /home after startup. Again, it all
>>> works well except that I have two /home directories - one on the ssd and
>>> the one that I use.
>>>
>>> Bill
>>>
>>> On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 02:17, Wesley Werner <wesley.werner at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Bill
>>>
>>> You said the boot drive is sda1, but your SSD disk lists as sdb2
>>> (UUID=2e740efb). Perhaps the BIOS is booting the wrong drive?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards
>>> Wesley Werner
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:03 AM Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I tried looking at the drive before mounting it as /home and this is
>>> what it looks like with mount -v (I asked nautilus to mount the '960 Gb
>>> drive')
>>> /dev/sda6 on /media/bill/b7092661-c008-4beb-9cdc-06c3dd036181 type ext4
>>> (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uhelper=udisks2)
>>>
>>> I can access it quite happily that way too.
>>>
>>> On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 16:19, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply Paolo. I confess that I am not quite sure what I
>>> should be looking for. The mount -v gives me:
>>> /dev/sda6 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime)
>>> While /proc/mounts has
>>> /dev/sda6 /home ext4 rw,relatime 0 0
>>>
>>> That would seem the same, but I am not sure I am looking at the right
>>> things.
>>>
>>> This is the ssd with the OS from mount -v:
>>> /dev/sdb2 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)
>>> and from /proc/mounts:
>>> /dev/sdb2 / ext4 rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 22:34, Paolo Gigante <paolo.gigante.sa at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Not that it should cause a crash but are you sure its an ext4 filesystem
>>> on that device?
>>> If the mount command works, you may want to try 'mount -v' to see what
>>> mount is actually doing. Once you have used the mount command to attach the
>>> FS, does the entry look like in /proc/mounts
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 2:38 PM Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Boot is on the hard drive - sda1
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 15:30, Frans de waal <meesterarend at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Just a thought... What is the boot drive in the bios?
>>>
>>> On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 15:10, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello everybody,
>>>
>>> I am trying to run 20.04 with my OS on an SSD device and my home
>>> directory on my old hard drive.
>>>
>>> This mount command works perfectly:
>>> sudo mount UUID=b7092661-c008-4beb-9cdc-06c3dd036181 /home
>>>
>>> However, when I try to do the same thing in fstab -
>>> # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
>>> #
>>> # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
>>> # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
>>> devices
>>> # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
>>> #
>>> # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
>>> # / was on /dev/sdb2 during installation
>>> UUID=2e740efb-b15b-4bea-9ef8-a20dd7a87186 /         ext4
>>>  noatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
>>> # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
>>> UUID=1c5e43a0-097c-4d68-90df-e544497323dd none            swap    sw
>>>          0       0
>>> #
>>> # Home is on sda6. Added 2020-06-13
>>> #
>>> UUID=b7092661-c008-4beb-9cdc-06c3dd036181 /home ext4
>>> nodev,nosuid,relatime  0  2
>>>
>>> The system crashes rather badly and says 'You are now in emergency mode'
>>> or something equivalent. (And I have no idea how to do anything in
>>> emergency mode!)
>>>
>>> I have used the example in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab
>>> (changing the UUID of course).
>>>
>>> I am sure that I am missing something very simple. Can anyone help
>>> please?
>>>
>>> Thanks, keep safe,
>>>
>>> Bill
>>>
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>>
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