How to write to files on OS (F8) that won't boot

Nigel Henry cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr
Sun Jun 15 11:52:09 UTC 2008


On Saturday 14 June 2008 07:09, Mike Williams wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Antonio Olivares
>
> <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > --- On Fri, 6/13/08, Nigel Henry <cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr> wrote:
> >> I've tried every incantion I can think of to write to
> >> F8's filesystem using
> >> Knoppix. I can read the files, can make changes to the
> >> files, but can't save
> >> the changes. Always permission denied.

> >> Would someone be kind enough to tell me how to get write
> >> access to an
> >> unbootable distro's filesystem, using Knoppix for
> >> example.
>
> This is from a message posted by Rob on this list, which was memorable
> (and searchable) due to the two words 'remount myself'
> Once you've booted from a knoppix or a rescue cd and have a shell prompt
>
> "Found it myself:  # mount -o remount,rw /
> Then I can edit and correct /etc/fstab."
>
> It worked for me once ;-)
>
> good luck,
>
> Mike

Sorry for the delay in replying to all the fine suggestions to fix the 
problem.

Dave Burns, and Mike above. Read the mount man page again, tried the 
incantations you suggested, which failed to work, with complaints about the 
partition already being mounted, not mounted, or synatax wrong. So I tried 
the line below, which did the job.
# mount -w /dev/sda1

Carroll. I had to do the line above first, but what you said about adding the 
root password was also necessary to be able to use KDE's superuser file 
manager.

Antonio. Thanks for your reply. I didn't try your suggestion, having already 
fixed the problem, as above, but thanks for the suggestion to try the DVD 
with chroot /mnt/sysimage, which would have been my next step, had Knoppix 
been a complete failure.

Anyway, having made the changes to grub.conf, I tried to boot F8 again, now 
with text on the screen, and it appeared to hang at "starting ipV6 tables", 
so I did a hard reset, and booted it again, selecting interactive mode, and 
saying "NO" to a whole bunch of services that I don't use anyway. Now the 
boot completed. Great "I thought", I use KDE, but forgot to change the 
session in GDM, and found myself in Gnome. With hindsight I should have 
stayed in Gnome, and made permanent changes to the services that were causing 
the bootup problem, but no, I was annoyed, logged out, and back into KDE.

Bad move. For some reason I have no mouse or keyboard in KDE, which is odd 
because I have F8 on a machine upstairs, with no such problems. You can see 
where this is going, because I had to do a hard reset, and go through the 
whole interactive bootup again, removing the unwanted services, so as get 
back into Gnome, so as to stop the dodgy service/s from being started at 
bootup.

So where I stand at the moment on this new machine (my first from scratch 
computer build), is that F8 boots up now, but I can only use Gnome at the 
moment, but that's for another thread.

Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon wouldn't bootup at all. It's a live CD, which when booted 
up into the desktop, you can run the installer from there. It starts to boot, 
then stops, and displays 4 repeated bits of underlined text in some pinkish 
colour, which even with my strong glasses on, is unreadable. Kubuntu Breezy 
Badger installed ok, but that is with a proper install CD. All I had to do 
was change the graphics driver to vesa (the graphics card has an ati one, and 
Breezy is probably a bit old to have an ati one that works).

Enough rambling. I'll give the rundown of the hardware I've built the machine 
with on another thread, to see if anyone is having problems, particularly 
with the Asus M2N-X Plus mobo, with AMD Athlon 64 3800 sktAM2 CPU.
All my OS's are i386, not X86_64.

Thanks again for the help.

Nigel.






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