Arch Linux

Cyrusm

Member

From: Bozeman, MT

Registered: 2007-11-15

Posts: 1,052

mtab very broken!

I have a very interesting problem with my mtab file that I am not entirely sure how to fix.
The problem started this morning, My desktop was working perfectly fine last night when I shut it down.  This morning when I try to start it up, I find that none of my partitions have mounted except for the root partition (which seems to be mounted read-only).
upon further investigation, I ran ls -l /etc, the result came up ??????????  ?  ? mtab   (the ?'s is where the permissions are normally listed).  I can't read, write, delete, rename, recreate or do anything, because my root account does not have permission.  am I stuck?  do I have to do a reinstall?  or is there some easy way that this problem can be fixed?

I need a speedy response, I'm going back to college in a couple of days and my Desktop is vital. 

cyrusm

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Hofstadter's Law:
           It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: mtab very broken!

Did you try to fsck the root partition?

Cyrusm

Member

From: Bozeman, MT

Registered: 2007-11-15

Posts: 1,052

Re: mtab very broken!

yes I did, nothing has changed.

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Hofstadter's Law:
           It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

cactus

Taco Eater

From: ಠ_ರೃ

Registered: 2004-05-25

Posts: 4,611

Website

Re: mtab very broken!

check dmesg output
check your fstab

hopefully dmesg will say something.

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ಠ_ಠ
"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos." -- Cactus' Law

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,818

Re: mtab very broken!

You obviously cannot alter anything if your system is mounted read-only.

mount -o rw,remount /

should take care of that. Then you can start modifying mtab accordingly.

Also - mtab is generated dynamically based on what's mounted - so what is the problem with it being 'broken' exactly? I'm not sure whether it gets just wiped upon shutdown/reboot, but your conclusion seems a bit bizarre...

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