I have my laptop partitioned so that I can boot multiple distros and operating systems. Currently, Vista is on sda1, Mint is on sda2 (root) and sda3 (/home) with a swap partition on sda5, Elive is on sda6 and sda7 and sda8 (root, /home, and swap, respectively) and then there's about 17 gigs of unallocated space after that. These are my working and "fun" distros, respectively.
I used to have the unallocated space partitioned into sda9, 10 and 11, for messing around with new stuff from Distrowatch. I'd install the new distro, install its GRUB to root (sda9) rather than MBR, and then cut and paste its menu listings into the menu.lst file of Mint's GRUB on MBR.
This all used to work fine when Mepis was on sda2 and 3 and Mint was my secondary distro. But this strategy stopped working when I made Mint my "main" distro and put it on sda 2 and 3. Now, if I try to install another distro onto what is now unallocated space but used to be sda 9, 10 and 11, it somehow messes us Mint's boot process. fsck fails during Mint boot and I have to ctrl-D to get boot to continue. I've reinstalled Mint 3 or 4 times because of this, and finally just got tired of it and deleted my "experimental" partitions, sda 9, 10 and 11. I couldn't figure out why this was happening.
Today, I happened to try to unmount sda6 or sda7 by right clicking on their hard drive icons on the Mint desktop and got this error message:
"CANNOT UNMOUNT THE VOLUME. UMOUNT: /MEDIA/SDA7, MOUNT DISAGREES WITH THE FSTAB."
Similarly, I can't unmount sda 6 or sda7 from gparted. It gives this error message:
The partition could not be unmounted from the following mountpoints:
/media/sda7
Most likely other partitions are also mounted on these mountpoints. You are advised to unmount them manually.
Now I'm wondering if somehow, in my mucking around with partitions, GRUB and multiple distros, I have messed up my fstab file!? Here are its contents:
steve@steve-laptop:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda2
UUID=d281df9c-3db8-4ddc-a667-845cc0d79f65 / reiserfs notail 0 1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=92916820-5ac7-40c3-a4ff-636369c6f688 /home reiserfs defaults 0 2
# /dev/sda1
UUID=4F18D68C65FBF8F8 /media/sda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
# /dev/sda6
UUID=c283ea20-0dc8-40ae-807b-374736cdc724 /media/sda6 reiserfs defaults 0 2
# /dev/sda7
UUID=294e8065-b9fd-43eb-8ad9-a2c65f31681c /media/sda7 reiserfs defaults 0 2
# /dev/sda5
UUID=3be98d7a-b97f-4885-904b-a906c9e14d58 none swap sw 0 0
# /dev/sda8
UUID=100c5087-5e19-44fa-ace7-fde691984223 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
steve@steve-laptop:~$
I don't know how to interpret this. Can anybody help me sort this out?
THANKS!!!
SF
