experimenting with the fstab file

[jerrybee]

I'd like to make some changes to my fstab file, but am afraid that the results might lock me out of Mint and prevent any kind of boot. Assume I've copied the original fstab file to something like fstab.old , and that the modified fstab now prevents me from booting. How do I go about using the Mint boot CD, or maybe a Knoppix CD, or something like that, to boot the box then get into my Mint /boot/grub subdir so that I can rename fstab.old to fstab so that I can once again boot Mint?

As a quick test of this, I just tried to go from Mint into the /boot/grub subdir of my Debian installation, and wasn't able to do anything there -- actually, the display showed nothing in the subdir, and it's a bootable installation.

[Acid7711]

It's easy, boot from ANY linux cd, and chroot in. It's as simple as that. Quite honestly, if all you're doing is copying over /etc/fstab.old to /etc/fstab, you don't even need to chroot, just mount with read/write options and copy the file over.

Honestly, I don't know why you're talking about /boot/grub and /etc/fstab. They're completely unrelated. Grub has nothing to do with you're system mount points and devices. Once grub finds, boots, and passes control to the kernel (and/or init.rd image if setup for one), the kernel acts upon fstab from that point forward. Once the kernel takes control, grub has done its job.

If you're like me and have boot mounted to a separate partition and Linux is the only thing on the drive, you're root partition might be located somewhere around /dev/sda3, otherwise it won't be. Most likely you have a root and a swap partition unless you've done some kind of custom partition setup. Use my examples for what they are.


Example:

Code: Select all

-Boot with your favorite linux cd
-open terminal
-mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/
cp /mnt/etc/fstab.old /etc/fstab
cd /
umount /dev/sda3


Something along those lines is all you need for something like that.