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.
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list