Re: Mount Problem

Unruh wrote:
Joseph Hesse <joe_hesse@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Hi,

My Fedora 9 system is partitioned as follows.

/dev/sda5 Swap Partition
/dev/sda6 Mounted as /boot

Why do you have a separate /boot partition?

Most Linux distributions do this as a default: it's a legacy of the old 1023 cylinder limit for locating LILO, and remains useful for filesystems that are not built into grub (such as REiserFS)

/dev/sda7 Mounted as /

You shoul dshow us your whole /etc/fstab. We do not know how you set up
your system. You admit you do not know what is going on, so you cannot be
trusted to summarize properly.

It works fine, no problems.

In addition, I have data on /dev/sda1 and I want to mount this
partition on my file system. I added the following line at the end of
/etc/fstab.

/dev/sda1 /mnt ext3 defaults 1 2 # just testing with /mnt

When I reboot the system, it works, the data on /dev/sda1 is visible
under /mnt. The problem is that this is only a test, I really want to
mount /dev/sda1 on /var/ftp/pub/fedora, not /mnt. This directory
chain exists. Therefore, I changed the previously added line in
/etc/fstab to:



/dev/sda1 /var/ftp/pub/fedora ext3 defaults 1 2 # this is what I want

Does /var/ftp/pub/fedora exist when the systme tries to mount stuff?


This time when I reboot the system the partition is not mounted. I
can easily see this by running "# mount". The unusual thing is if I
now run "# mount /dev/sda1" the mount command reads fstab and mounts

mount -a

/dev/sda1 on /var/ftp/pub/fedora. I don't understand why the entry in
fstab doesn't do the mount when the system is started. Any
suggestions would be appreciated.

It could be that the partition does not exist at the time, or some race
condition. Show us your complete /etc/fstab.

Here is some additional information.

1. Fedora 9 is installed on an external USB hard drive. My BIOS
allows booting from it.

The external usb may not yet be operational when mount tries to mount the
file.

USB hard drive? You're using an external USB hard drive for this? That can present adventures:




2. When I installed Fedora 9 I used fdisk on the live CD to do the
partitioning on the USB drive. The USB disk appeared as sdb and the
computer's internal drive was sda. I also used the live CD to do the
install on the USB hard drive.

Are you sure it is /dev/sdb?


3. After the install was complete and Fedora 9 was booted, the drive
letters were reversed, sda is now the Fedora 9 OS and sdb is the
computer's internal hard drive.

So that relabeling could well mess up your system while booting.

Yup. SCSI drive renumbering is an issue for many situations: This is why Fedora uses LABEL=/ and LABEL=/boot for labeled ext3 partitons in /etc/fstab. You might consider using this instead of using hard-coded /dev/sda* entries.


4. Grub was properly installed on the USB hard drive.



5. It all works except for the mounting problem.

Thank you,
Joe Hesse


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