CLOSED: Editing fstab in emergency mode?

jkbuckethead
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CLOSED: Editing fstab in emergency mode?

Postby jkbuckethead » Thu Jun 21, 2018 6:21 pm

I recently replaced a drive with a larger hard drive. After completing the greyhole -going command I removed the old drive from /etc/fstab, shutdown, and swapped the drives. After rebooting I proceeded to add the new drive using the disc wizard add disc tab. The first time I tried adding the drive the process would not finish. The wizard sat there looking for a partition table for a very long time. This might have been a mistake on my part, but eventually I gave up waiting and reloaded the disc add page. This time the drive add completed in the usual amount of time. With the drive added I added it to my greyhole pool and went on using the HDA as normal.

Unfortunately, the first time I rebooted the HDA after the drive swap it booted into emergency mode. While starting up an error message flashed on the screen briefly (so briefly I had to take a photo so I could read it). Paraphrasing, the error message was about "systemd-fstab-generator being unable to mount the new drive because of a duplicate entry in /etc/fstab. I'm guessing the first attempt at adding the drive created an entry, then when I tried a 2nd time it created another. I didn't expect this to happen since the disc wizard normally does not offer up previously added drives for new. Not sure, but now I'm wondering if this is the cause for my emergency mode.

If I could access the /etc/fstab file it would be simple enough to remove the duplicate line, but I don't know how. The first line on the emergency mode boot screen seems to imply that I should be able to log in, but the first paragraph is followed by a message that says "Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked." Then it says press enter to continue, but when I do that it just comes back to this screen.

Is there a way to edit /etc/fstab from this screen?

I don't currently have another linux machine. Thinking about pulling the boot drive and trying to edit the file on a windows PC. If that doesn't work my other alternative is to start from scratch, and reinstall. That would be a major pain for what might be a minor error.

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bigfoot65
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Re: Editing fstab in emergency mode?

Postby bigfoot65 » Fri Jun 22, 2018 4:51 pm

If you search the internet you will find help.

One example is how to edit fstab system file in Linux maintenance mode.
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jkbuckethead
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Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:35 pm

Re: Editing fstab in emergency mode?

Postby jkbuckethead » Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:31 pm

Thanks. I found a similar post on how to mount the boot drive in read/write, but unfortunately it wasn't any use because I couldn't get to an actual console. When I hit enter to continue it would just come back to the same error screen. I tried creating a flash drive of the fedora netinstall iso because it offers a Recover option, but that too would end up at the same error screen. Finally I created a live usb drive, and booted to that. I could at least get a console that way, but being mostly clueless with linux I could not figure out how to mount the drive and edit file.

I just decided to reinstall amahi since I figured that would take less time than learning linux.

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bigfoot65
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Re: Editing fstab in emergency mode?

Postby bigfoot65 » Mon Jun 25, 2018 5:31 pm

Sorry to hear repair efforts were unsuccessful.

Since you reinstalled, I presum we can mark this thread as closed.
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