Dec 30 2008
Booting into a read-only environment
This situation presents itself infrequently, but when it does you cannot modify any files.
Here is an example of an occurrence…
A linux box wouldn’t boot properly and reported a problem with an ext2 filesystem on one of the partitions it was trying to mount.
The only option was to drop into a ‘repair shell’ to run e2fsck/fsck on the various partitions to see which one was having trouble.
As it so happens there were other problems that prompted this to happen: the only listings in /etc/fstab were for the cdrom and floppy drives.
Nothing else was being mounted, with the exception of the root partition / .It was impossible to mount filesystems or edit files (like /etc/fstab) in the read-only environment, but there is a way around it…
#> mount -o remount,rw /dev/hdb# / , where hdb# is the logical mount point of the root (/) partition. For instance, if your root partition (/) is actually /dev/hdb1 then hdb# is hdb1.
This mounts the root partition / as a read-write filesystem and by doing so you should be able to edit files and mount other filesystems…ugh!
One Response to “Booting into a read-only environment”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Not A Member? Register for Free!
Thanks. I was searching for this…