Help!!! Removed unused drive and now I can't boot

[JustKIDn]

Hi all,

I know this sounds dumb, but how else do you learn!?!?

Recently, I installed Suse 9.0. The system had one cdrom and three Hard Drives.

IDE cable #1 had CD as first with a 2 GB Drive as Slave.

IDE cable #2 had a 3 GB drive with another 3 GB drive as Slave.

Suse decided it was a good idea to create a swap on hdc1 and install the OS on hdc2.

Since I didn't need the 2 GB drive in this pc I thought I'd put it in another one for my kids. This is where the trouble began.

I edited fstab and changed the locations from /dev/hdc2 to /dev/hda2 and /dev/hdd2 to /dev/hdb2.
I made a backup of the original fstab file in case something went wrong.

I shutdown the computer, removed the 2 GB drive, and then changed the IDE cables so the drives would be on IDE1 and the CDROM would be on IDE2.

When I booted up it said "OS is not installed".

So I put the drives back the way they were and rebooted and the GRUB screen came up. But of course it couldn't do a complete boot because I changed the fstab file.

So I tried the "safe boot" option. It didn't actually boot, but I got a login prompt. I can see the fstab file but I can't fix it because the file system is loaded as "read only". BTW the filesystem is ReiserFS.

Somehow GRUB must be installed on the 2 GB drive. So I'll need to find a way to get that moved to the other drive and make it active.

Any ideas how to fix all this? I guessed that some of this might happen. I figured I could just edit the files as needed and go on. I didn't count on the filesystem being read only.

I can't figure a way to boot from a floppy and edit the files.

O.K. when you get done laughing will you help me?


tgus

____________________________
Families can be together forever...

 

[160473]

I think the problem is that lilo does not know where the boot partition is. You need to edit lilo.conf and run lilo again.

 

[JustKIDn]

Thanks, but I'm not sure how that helps.

I've been using GRUB for the bootloader not Lilo.

I haven't figured out how to edit any files, as the filesystem is mounted as read only.

If I could figure a way to mount the filesystem as read write, I think I could put my original fstab file back in place.

Right now I'm trying to find a way to create a boot diskette so I could boot off a floppy (like you would with DOS) and then edit the files I need.

I like the idea of a journaling filesystem with reiserfs, but the one bootdisk I have is older and doesn't know anything about reiserfs.

Anyone know where to get a boot disk? Not a rescue disk!

tgus

____________________________
Families can be together forever...

 

[JustKIDn]

I fixed it!

I searched this forum and many others on the net and no one else seemed to ever report any problem with the filesystem mounting as readonly. I am surprised! Is this just a reiserfs only problem?

The closest good advice I found was related to GRUB;

grub-install /dev/hda

Replace /dev/hda with the appropriate drive (mine was /dev/hdc)

This didn't work for me because my filesystem was mounted as readonly, and grub-install wanted to write to a log file on /tmp.
However, I did find that I could mount /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdd2. So I mounted /dev/hdb1 to /tmp and then tried to run grub-install again. It looked like it was going to work but then at the end, it failed.

I tried many variations and combinations of booting and editing and such. I won't detail all the failures here.
I feel like Thomas Edison trying to invent the lightbulb: He had ten thousand (10,000) failures before he got it to work right. He said he knows ten thousand ways that won't work.

I tried so many different things, that I don't know for sure, but I think this is the final things that made it work;

I removed the drive that I wanted to remove to begin with.
After determining which of the remaining two drives was the one that should boot, (they both looked almost the same by their partitions in fdisk, because they both have a swap partition in the same place and almost the same size) I made that drive/partition active in fdisk.
I started the install CD, and tried to "Boot Installed System". It failed!
So I aborted the install procedure. Which took me back to the text mode (manual) install screens.
Just for kicks, I tried "Boot Installed System" from this screen. It listed my drives and asked me which one to boot from.
I chose /dev/hda2.
It prompted me to insert the Modules 4 disk.
After loading the disk, it began booting my system!

It failed on a few things like eth0 but I didn't worry about those things. I figured it was because it didn't load the right kernel or something.

After I logged into KDE as root, I started YaST2 and configured the bootloader (GRUB).
I saved the new configuration after everything looked right.

I shutdown the system and turned it off.

When I turned it back on, it booted normally as if there was never anything wrong! Even the errors from before like eth0 were gone.

The reason I'm sharing all this with you all. Is because I hate searching forums and finding questions similar to mine. Only to find that the original poster either doesn't report back that the suggestions made worked. Or they just say "I fixed it. Thanks", so you don't know what they did to fix it!

IMHO, I think these forums are here to help each other. And if we don't share with others, how we "fixed" it. Then we've only helped ourselves, NOT others.


I hope this helps someone. Actually, I hope no one else ever has this problem. But if they do, maybe this will help!

BTW: I never did get the answer to how to create a boot disk that can read a reiserfs filesystem. Any ideas?

Thanks for listening!

tgus

____________________________
Families can be together forever...