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List:       suse-linux-uk-schools
Subject:    Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Second Hard Disk - Warning
From:       James Samuel <james () suse ! co ! uk>
Date:       2000-03-29 9:48:51
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On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, adrian.wells wrote:

> How not to do it!
> 
> I wanted to add a second 2GB disk to my susebox and followed the
> instructions on pages 449/450 of the manual.
> All went well as far as item 5 [twice :-( ]
> 
> The first two attempts provided me with a read-only /OPT folder which meant
> that LINUX would not boot/start all processes AND I could not edit
> /etc/fstab ! - That is to say that I could not save any changes made in vi.
> (would it have been possible to change the file attributes manually?)
> 
> On the second re-build (getting good at it now!) I spotted the problem, the
> attributes in /etc/fstab shown in the book were different to mine!
> 
> Mine look like this - I assume that anyone using YaST2 to install would
> have a similar table.
> /dev/hda3	/	ext2	defaults	1 2
> /dev/hda2	swap	swap	defaults	0 1
> /dev/hda1	/boot	ext2	defaults	1 1
> /dev/hdb3	/opt	ext2	defaults	1 1
> 
> I copied the attributes of the /boot partion, as per the manual.
> Anyway it works very well now :-)
> 
> Can you offer any explanation/advice please Roger?

To be honest, I can't explain why /etc/fstab was unwriteable, unless the
partition was mounted read only for some reason - same for /opt. But then,
that shouldn't happen under normal circumstances. If the filesystem is
read only, nothing can be done to the file attributes at all. A possible
workaround might have been to remount the partition rw, by doing: mount /
-o remount,rw - which should have made it writeable again.

With regard to the attributes in fstab being different, as far as I am
aware, the last column of attributes being slightly different shouldn't
stop things from working, because that only determines how fsck checks the
drives if it needs to.

-- 
James Samuel
Network Manager, SuSE Linux Ltd.
Direct Phone: +44 (0)208 387 1485 Fax: +44 (0)208 387 4010


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