Re: Linux Mounting problem

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Venkatesh Ramachandran wrote:

> Hello,
>    I am using Redhat Linux 7.1
>    During reboot, i get the message " Mounting / as readonly"
>    And, it enters into maintenance mode...( & all other steps fail -
> /proc not mounted, swap not mounted, fsck fails)
>    I did the following :
>    mount -t proc proc /proc
>    fsck /dev/hda1
>    The following error messages : ERROR : Couldn't open /dev/null
> (Read-only file system)
> 

First, verify that /dev/null is a character device, major=1, minor=3.
`file /dev/null`.
It may have gotten changed to some real file because of some errors.

In maintenance mode do:

/sbin/mount -n -o remount /dev/hda1 # Mount r/w, no write to /etc/mtab
/bin/rm /dev/null             # Delete it
/bin/mknod /dev/null c 1 3    # Make a new one
/bin/chmod 777 /dev/null      # Accessible by everyone in all modes
/bin/chown root.sys /dev/null # Standard ownership
/sbin/umount /dev/hda1        # Now unmount it
/sbin/mount /proc /proc -t proc # You can mount it if you want
/sbin/e2fsck -f /dev/hda1     # Fix the disk
... After you fix the errors ...
`exec /sbin/init auto`  (or exit if from a startup script)

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (799.53 BogoMips).

    I was going to compile a list of innovations that could be
    attributed to Microsoft. Once I realized that Ctrl-Alt-Del
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