home on a separate partition is not mounted

[joeki]

Hi

I made a hdinstall of knoppix and everything works, but not the
mount of the home partition which I have entered in the fstab.

Somwhere there seems to be a script which is running during boottime
which changes the mount procedure.

Maybe someone can help

Kind Regards
Jochen

[hamatoma]

On my system the mount of the home partition works fine.

What says "mount /home"?
Nothing: check the rights and ownership of fstab. Else I have no other idea!

Anything else:
* Check your entry in FSTAB,
* Check the correctness of /dev/hdaX (X is the number of your partition). (After a crash last year I lost some special files in /dev)
Nothing found? Please write the message from mount and your fstab. Perhaps someone has an idea.

Regards
Hamatoma

[SUOrangeman]

I can relate to the original post. Even though I've correctly stated this in /etc/fstab, not everything gets mounted at boot. And when I comment out all of my edits, some of partitions are mounted.

I think a part of the situation, and I don't know why, depends on what is mounted when you 'chroot' to your new install and run lilo. After I completed running the knx-hdinstall script, I modified my install area to taste. I backed out of the mount point so I could 'chroot' and noted that some of my mods in the new /etc/fstab were now listed in /etc/mtab but not mounted. I still haven't figured out the right combination of edits, and wonder if something else runs at boot that intervenes with mounting partitions.

-SUO

[fitsnips]

/dev/hda5 /home ext3 defaults 0 0,

Just change ext3 to what ever your fs is.

[RobEoh]

No matter what I add to /etc/fstab, something is appending entries to the file that negate the entries I've made on boot. I can manually mount the partitions fine after boot, but I would like to automount. It may be autofs, but 'cat /proc/filesystems' doesn't show it and /etc/auto.master doesn't exist. Editing /etc/auto.mnt doesn't seem to have an effect. Is it /etc/mtab or something else I'm missing?

[fingers99]

fitsnips has it right.

You need to comment out (put a # at the start of a line) any conflicting entries for thae device in question.

Then, after saving the new /etc/fstab, do (as root)

mount -a

[RobEoh]

Thanks for the post(s).

The issue seems to not be with an incorrect entry in fstab, but with a script being run at boot time that adds new lines to fstab. So, for instance, if I manually edit fstab to mount hda3 with the auto option, something comes in and adds a line below it for hda3 with noauto option. My assumption is all lines are executing correctly and the overall effect is to negate previous entries in the file. So the key seems to be to find the script that is adding the entries and modifyi it.

Also, do I have it right that if a device is in fstab then it is not necessary to 'mount /dev/hd* /mnt/hd*' ? This is definately a newbie Q but I've got to ask it.

[fingers99]

Also, do I have it right that if a device is in fstab then it is not necessary to 'mount /dev/hd* /mnt/hd*' ? This is definately a newbie Q but I've got to ask it.

It's a good question to ask.

If there is no entry in /etc/fstab you'll be unable to mount the device.

So an entry only makes it possible for it to be mounted.

man fstab

and

man mount

should make things pretty clear (read them in conjunction with looking at your /etc/fstab).

Just a thought -- you did edit /etc/fstab as root? Do:

su
(enter root password)

gvim /etc/fstab



then hit the "i" key to get into insert mode. Everything else you can do with the mouse.

[RobEoh]

Thanks for your reply and clarifying the role of fstab.

Yes I edit it in vi as root. It's owned by root and, of course, belongs to group root.

As I read about automount and autofs, it's interesting that the docs suggest there should be /etc/auto.master. However, this standard install of DSL contains /etc/auto.mnt instead. It reads very much like the auto.misc. So, I'm left wondering what is really acting on fstab.

Perhaps I should uninstall autofs and see what happens? Does anyone know the how to uninstall it?

[GlennsPref]

try this to find what gets changed during boot.
straight after your system has booted, open a console, "su" to change to root/super-or-substitute user, "cd /proc" to change to the processor dir.
then type this in "dmesg |more" (without quotes) see how you go.