Arch Linux

Lazze

Member

From: Bangkok, Thailand

Registered: 2008-09-28

Posts: 133

Filesystem problems

Hi

I think I have some serious problems with how arch gets my harddsik. I chose the automated way to partition my drive when installing arch but I think something went wrong.

Some symptoms are:
- Grub doesn't find my menu.lst file and uses the default
- My primary drive is always mounted as read only except when in specifying rw in the grub boot command
- When running command df -m I get:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
none                  188M     0  188M   0% /dev/shm

My fstab looks like this:

# <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
none                   /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
none                   /dev/shm      tmpfs     defaults            0      0

/dev/cdrom             /media/cd   auto    ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
/dev/dvd               /media/dvd  auto    ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
/dev/fd0               /media/fl   auto    user,noauto             0      0

Seems like the harddrive isn't listed correctly, how should I fix this?

Thanks
// Lasse

shazeal

Member

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2007-06-05

Posts: 341

Re: Filesystem problems

Sounds like the old /boot is not /boot switch-a-roony. You need to point grub to the correct /boot partition.

Say (hd0,0) is your boot, and (hd0,1) is your root / partition. Grub is most likely looking in (hd0,1)/boot. Its all rather confusing. Easiest way to check is to boot up. umount /boot, and check the contents. mount /boot and check again, you should see pretty quickly which one you edited and which one grub is actually using.

Sorry also for the fstab, you will need something like.

/dev/sdxx /boot ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sdxx / ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1

Where sdxx is the approriate disk.

Last edited by shazeal (2008-11-11 19:40:07)

Lazze

Member

From: Bangkok, Thailand

Registered: 2008-09-28

Posts: 133

Re: Filesystem problems

Thanks for the reply

I've got the partitions set up correctly except for the boot partition.
Tried to add it to fstab and mount it but the I get an error saying "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1"

When I run fdisk -l I get the following output:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          17      136552   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              18         279     2104515   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3             280       29600   235520932+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           29601       30401     6434032+  83  Linux

Seems like I've edited another menu.list since my /boot wasn't mounted, any ideas why I can't mount my boot partition?

shazeal

Member

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2007-06-05

Posts: 341

Re: Filesystem problems

Just do 'mount /dev/sda1 /boot'. Then do just a 'mount' and see what FS type was used for it, maybe ext2?

jacko

Member

Registered: 2007-11-23

Posts: 840

Re: Filesystem problems

it sounds like you need take a trip to the wiki and read the BEGINNERS GUIDE. Most of this simple stuff has been covered a thousand times over before. That is why there is a wiki.

editing fstab is covered in the BEGINNERS GUIDE!

Lazze

Member

From: Bangkok, Thailand

Registered: 2008-09-28

Posts: 133

Re: Filesystem problems

The problem is that I can't mount /dev/sda1 at all I get the following error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

When running dmesg I cet following:

ext3: No journal on filesystem on sda1

Is there a way to recover the boot partition or create a new one?

Thanks
// Lasse

buddabrod

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 220

Re: Filesystem problems

Are you sure this isnt an ext2 partition? Check with e2fsdump or head.

Lazze

Member

From: Bangkok, Thailand

Registered: 2008-09-28

Posts: 133

Re: Filesystem problems

Ahh... I feel a bit stupid missing the fact that I was trying to mount an ext2 partition as ext3.

Everything seems to be working fine now, thanks everyone for your help!