Re: More Trouble installing 1.4.1...

[fheitka%attglobal.net@localhost]

In <49D446EAD33BD311AA320004AC4C5F7304C659@FILESERVER>, on 02/23/00 
   at 06:20 AM, Paul Andrews <paul.andrews%smartmove.co.nz@localhost> said:

You can  fix it.   You need to understand how the Unix boot
process works and mimic it with commands you type.

By dropping you into the shell Unix is helping you.  I know
it's  hard to believe. :)

What you need to do is mount the root partition r/w.  You
may have to run fsck first if the partition is dirty.  Then
you need to do the same with your usr partition, because
that is probably where vi is (but maybe not) otherwise
you will be stuck using ed.  Then you can fix your fstab.

The hardest part is remembering the correct syntax for
the mount command.  On Linux you would use:
"mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 / -o remount" or something
close.  On BSD the command is different.  Perhaps someone
on the list could show you.

If you can't access vi, you can at least use ed to comment
out your bad fstab line.  Ed is a fun beast too.

Good luck.

>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?