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chimeracoder

Member

From: New York

Registered: 2010-10-24

Posts: 73

[SOLVED] Ext2 to Ext3 conversion failed, now unable to boot

I tried converting most of my partitions from ext2 to ext3 recently. I believe I may have either forgotten to update the fstab or run mkinitcpio afterwards, because when I try to boot up my computer now, I get this error:

mount: mounting /dev/sdb3 on /new_root failed: No such device
ERROR: Failed to mount the real root device
Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck.

sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

I'm left at a limited shell which doesn't let me do very much (no fsck, mkinitcpio, reboot, or even shutdown). Curiously, I can mount /dev/sdb3 to / or /new_root in this shell, but only if I specify the filetype as ext2.

I have a live USB with Gparted on it, but I'm not sure how to access my real fstab from it - when I try mounting /dev/sdb3 in Gparted, I end up with an fstab that's not the one that I've set up on my computer.

How do I fix my filesystems so that I can boot my computer?

Last edited by chimeracoder (2011-10-20 02:47:53)

toad

Member

From: if only I knew

Registered: 2008-12-22

Posts: 1,775

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Ext2 to Ext3 conversion failed, now unable to boot

Look for more fstabs then and try to make sense of gparted's device naming All you need is access to your /

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never trust a toad...
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chimeracoder

Member

From: New York

Registered: 2010-10-24

Posts: 73

Re: [SOLVED] Ext2 to Ext3 conversion failed, now unable to boot

Thanks, toad! It turned out in the end that the fallback image was working properly, so I was able to boot into that. From there, I just re-ran mkinitcpio -p linux, and all was good.

For anybody else who has this problem, I also set GRUB to refer to my boot partition by UUID, though I don't think it was the problem, since my fallback kernel was working.