[WBEL-users] 2nd disk

Kirby C. Bohling kbohling at birddog.com
Thu Apr 28 11:31:04 CDT 2005


On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 09:18:27AM -0700, John Lowry wrote:
> 
> Kirby,
> 
> I think your point about the label being the culprit is probably right.  I'll
> look at that when I next need to do it.  /etc/fstab doesn't have any hdb in it,
> so I didn't suspect anything there, but the boot sequence did complain about
> label(s).  Dmesg didn't save the errors, unfortunately :-(

What is in /etc/fstab?

Probably a line that looks a lot like this:

LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults 1 2

If that is the case, I'll bet /dev/hdb and /dev/hda have a
filesystem with "/var" as the label.  If that is what is in your
/etc/fstab, just go change it to be:

/dev/hdaX               /var                    ext3    defaults 1 2

    Thanks,
        Kirby


> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> 
> On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Kirby C. Bohling wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 08:52:09AM -0700, John Lowry wrote:
> > >
> > > Friends,
> > >
> > > I'm trying to mount my old suse 8.1 drive as hdb on my WhiteBox machine.  Both
> > > disks boot independently.  However, booting White Box fails because apparently
> > > it wants to mount hdb as /var, and gets lots of read only file system warnings.
> > >
> > > Any ieas?
> >
> > I've never used SuSe in my life, however, I've had somewhat similar
> > problems when putting two RHL disks into the same machine.  The
> > problem was actually disk labels.
> >
> > You'll want to check that the BIOS disks are what you want.  You
> > might try booting into single user mode, or emergency mode (add
> > "single" or "emergency" to the end of your boot commands in GRUB).
> >
> > Emergency will mount your root filesystem and give you a root shell
> > so you can do investigation (it won't fsck your filesystem even if
> > it needs it, so use with caution).  It is one way to get control of
> > a machine that you need to, even if what you are doing is unsafe.
> > I've used it before to turn DMA on for an fsck, because hdparm is
> > run after fsck is run on your filesystems.  Saved myself several
> > hours of downtime.
> >
> > It sure sounds like the culprit is in your /etc/fstab (that's what
> > it uses to pick where you mount what partition).  It'd be more
> > helpful if you gave a full error message, a bit more context of
> > where it is in the boot cycle, and the contents of your /etc/fstab.
> >
> > Boot each machine and run e2label /dev/hdaX on each partition (where
> > X is the partition number).  If any two from the two machines are
> > identical, and your /etc/fstab uses that label, that's your problem.
> >
> > Your symptoms don't exactly match mine, as RH would pick the wrong
> > root filesystem.  However, the differences might be accounted for by
> > SuSe being the other disk.
> >
> >     Thanks,
> >         Kirby
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Whitebox-users at beau.org
> > http://beau.org/mailman/listinfo/whitebox-users
> >
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