fstab and Grub
I grow tired of all the Label things going on in Fedora now. I wanted to
let a user mount and unmount file systems since I'm the only user...I
had this all working in Red Hat 9. Then I went to Fedora Core 4 and to
my dismay I found that HAL was writing fstab every boot up. So you
really didn't want to play with it any more.
Now on my FC6 I see that fstab and grub are not messed with by HAL any
more. So I set about to make things people readable. Here is what
"fdisk" finds on my two hard drives:
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 1217 9775521 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 1218 1945 5847660 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 1946 1961 128520 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hdb4 1962 19457 140536620 5 Extended
/dev/hdb5 1962 7060 40957686 83 Linux
/dev/hdb6 7061 12159 40957686 83 Linux
/dev/hdb7 12160 18534 51207156 83 Linux
Command (m for help):
[root@localhost ~]# fdisk /dev/hda
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 59598.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 30.7 GB, 30758289408 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 59598 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 19524 9839781 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 19524 20369 425722+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3 20369 40689 10241437+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda4 40689 59591 9526545 83 Linux
/dev/hda5 20369 30537 5124703+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 30537 40689 5116671 83 Linux
Command (m for help):
There is a lot of old linux partitions shown.
What I did then is edit fstab and grub.conf and replace the lables
with actual /dev/hda1 type devices.
My original fstab looks like this:
LABEL=/1234 / ext3 defaults 1 1
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=+`àQñGM@O2RÕ{ÏA swap swap defaults 0 0
LABEL=ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ swap swap defaults 0 0
The swap listings were ugly!
Here is what it looks like now:
[root@k5d ~]# more /etc/fstab
/dev/hdb5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb7 /fc4 ext3 noauto, user 0 0
[root@k5d ~]#
For some reason the last line is not working right. I think maybe I need
to remember what I did. Maybe a # at the first and last line.
Grub is now looking like this:
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd1,6)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb7
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,6)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.20-1.2962.fc6)
root (hd1,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-1.2962.fc6 ro root=/dev/hdb5 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.20-1.2962.fc6.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.20-1.2952.fc6)
root (hd1,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6 ro root=/dev/hdb5 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.16-1.2111_FC4)
root (hd1,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4 ro root=/dev/hdb7 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.16-1.2108_FC4)
root (hd1,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2108_FC4 ro root=/dev/hdb7 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.16-1.2108_FC4.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/hdb2 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.5-1.358)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=/dev/hdb1 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
title WindowsXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
[root@k5d ~]#
I have rebooted with all these changes and it comes up just as well
as always. Unless someone thinks this is real bad I will continue with
the project.
Karl
