Can't mount hard driveForum: Other Help Topics Topic: Can't mount hard drive started by: apw546 Posted by apw546 on Nov. 21 2007,04:11
I made a fairly huge mistake recently with my hard drive. I've been experimenting with DSL on an old laptop I had lying around, and had some trouble getting a swap file to work. I eventually got really tired of messing around with the included utility, and tried to do some manual work with the terminal. After doing this, and not getting any results, I just gave up. But when restarted my computer the next time, the hard drive did not show up on the auto-mount interface, or any other area that I could think of to look. When it's booting up, it says something along the lines of "Using swap partition: hda1," and in /etc/fstab there's a line that says "/dev/hda1 none swap," and some other stuff I can't remember. If any one can make some sense of that, it would be much appreciated.Thanks Posted by jpeters on Nov. 21 2007,04:45
Check "sudo fdisk -l /etc/hda" to see if your swap drive is listed. I believe it should be formated to 82 Linux.The /etc/fstab read seems about right. On mine it's "/dev/hda2 none swap defaults 0 0" Edit: also, run "dmesg | grep swap" On mine: "Adding Swap: 2097136k swap-space (priority -1)" Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 21 2007,14:10
It doesn't sound like anything is wrong here, unless hda1 is not your intended swap partition. The swap is not supposed to appear in the mount interface, since it is not used as a file system.
Posted by apw546 on Nov. 21 2007,16:55
Well, the thing is, hda1 was the only partition on the hard drive. See, I just expected that the manual commands would do something similar to the DOS swapfile utility. I didn't realize it would make the whole partition a swap partition. And I haven't installed DSL yet. I've just been booting with the live cd, and saving my settings through backups on the existing FAT32 partition. Anyway, I think I'm going to take the dive and reformat the hard drive with cfdisk, and do a frugal install. Wish me luck.
Posted by apw546 on Nov. 21 2007,20:45
Okay, so I tried to install DSL, and when I did the menu option for a Grub frugal install, this is what it gave me:
What in the world is going on here? Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 22 2007,00:20
If you partitioned again with cfdisk, make sure you reboot first -- as cfdisk recommends when you exit.
Posted by apw546 on Nov. 22 2007,22:15
Well, I finally got it installed. As it turned out, for some reason it was trying to use hda1 as a swap partition. Once I booted up with the cheat code noswap, it worked fine, except for one little thing: I can't modify the menu.lst for Grub. It says it's on a read-only file system. I don't know how that could be, because I didn't set it as read-only, and I can't imagine any reason why that would be the default. But I don't know how to change it, so that would be the thing to figure out.
Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 23 2007,00:19
Ah i see your problem -- DSL automatically uses any swap it can detect, so you'd have to do that noswap boot or use the command swapoff.With root privileges, edit /cdrom/boot/grub/menu.lst if you are booting with frugal. Posted by apw546 on Nov. 23 2007,02:36
Still doesn't work. I got the same read-only error.
Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 23 2007,06:05
What did you try to do? (List your steps)Also, pasting the output of the command `mount` here could help. Posted by apw546 on Nov. 23 2007,15:32
Well, first, I mounted the filesystem, and it gave me no feedback, which I assumed was an indication that it worked properly; then I typed "sudo nano /cdrom/boot/grub/menu.lst" and executed it. It opened fine, but when I modified it and tried to save it, it said "[ Could not open file for writing: Read-only file system ]." That was when I groaned in frustation, and exited the program.
Posted by apw546 on Nov. 23 2007,17:37
Never mind. I tried it using Beaver, and it worked fine. Go figure.
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