civileme,
Wonderful -- thank you! It appears I am back in business with no
problems.
I plan to archive your instructions on my wiki (initially my private
wiki, and later on my public wiki, WikiLearn, when it is up and
running).
A few notes / questions: (The notes are mostly for my records.)
1. I actually started the install with the intent of running it until
the partitions were displayed so I could see which was my / partition.
I could not display the partition table -- I forget exactly what stopped
me. But, neither did I cause any additional damage, AFAICT.
2. While following your procedure I followed a trial and error approach
-- I tried mounting the partition I thought was /, then tried the
chroot. It worked when I tried /dev/hda4 (which clearly was my /
partition).
3. I now know why you suggested cat -- less won't work.
4. I followed the mke2fs procedure. It gave me what might be some
useful information, all of which I did not write down. I did note that
it made superblock backups at 32,768, 98,304, and 163,840.
Q: If this happened again, would it be worth trying the e2fsck -b
command against one of those superblock backups?
5. When I tried the reboot command nothing happened. (I wasn't sure it
was a command, so when nothing happened after 15 seconds, I rebooted
manually.) I should have tried shutdown -r now, or maybe /sbin/reboot.
Thanks again! This is wonderful! If you have any problem with me
putting this post on my twiki or WikiLearn, let me know. In any event,
the intent would be someday to rewrite as just a factual micro HOWTO, on
WikiLearn.
regards,
Randy Kramer
civileme wrote:
> OK boot with the boot CD
>
> Hit F1 and typr "rescue" without the quotes
>
> when the root prompt for the rescue system comes up
>
> # mount /(your / partition's actual disk partiton like /dev/hda6) /mnt
> # chroot /mnt
> # mount /usr
>
> You now are in root mode and have access to your editors, at least the
> non-graphic ones.
>
> # cat /etc/fstab
> Either make note of what partition /home2 would be mounted to or make note of
> the line and fire up emacs with emacs /etc/fstab and comment it out. or do
> what is said below.
>
> # mke2fs (partition where /home2 is mounted)
>
> # sync
> # reboot
>
> Take iut your rescue CD and let it boot