Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 16:49:03 +1000 From: Joel Hatton <joel@auscert.org.au> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: How to successfully mount /root if not in fstab? Message-ID: <200408020649.i726n3iP025630@app.auscert.org.au>
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Hi, I've been caught out (twice now - yes, I was stupid enough to do this twice!) with mounting /root after removing a hard disk from my system and would like to know why it wasn't trivial to recover. I had FreeBSD 4.10 installed on ad1, with ad0 hosting the boot manager and ad1 containing an msdos boot sector; I removed ad0 from the system and forgot to edit /etc/fstab before rebooting. With ad1 now ad0, the system booted the kernel ok, but /root couldn't be found (of course) - at this point all was as expected. However, when prompted for a mount command, I don't know why "ufs:/dev/ad0s1a" didn't work - error 6 and the prompt was redisplayed. To recover, I booted from a fixit CD, mounted /root and edited fstab to reflect the new arrangement and all was well. However, I discovered another anomaly while doing this - when I entered the fixit shell I first tried "fsck -y /dev/ad0s1a" but it returned an error about /etc/fstab. I was able to "mount -o rw /dev/ad0s1a /mydir", however. Why? Sorry for the lack of detail, but I'll bet both of these things have been encountered by many others before... cheers, -- Joel Hatton -- Security Analyst | Hotline: +61 7 3365 4417 AusCERT - Australia's national CERT | Fax: +61 7 3365 7031 The University of Queensland | WWW: www.auscert.org.au Qld 4072 Australia | Email: auscert@auscert.org.au
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