Have you checked the FAQ?

	http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/misc/#why-single-user


		David/absolute

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Paul Andrews wrote:

> What can be done when NetBSD gets a really bad error on
> startup and drops you into the shell? It seems to mount
> everything read only so I cannot fix anything. It
> happened when I tried to add my ADos workbench partition
> to fstab so I could copy some files - now netBSD just
> has a fit when it boots and prompts me for a shell. If
> I mount the usr partition (mount /usr) and try to run
> vi it fails because it can't create it's temp file. And
> I can't write to fstab because / is read only :-(
> All I added to fstab was something like:
> /dev/sd1a /wb ados rw 1 4
> I can't *exactly* remember but I copied the format of
> / and /usr and incremented the last number (mount order),
> so I figured it would work [the above may be in the wrong
> order, but I'm at work so I can't check exactly what I did].
> 
> What can I do?
>