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I accidentally copied over five million lines of gibberish to my fstab file. After, also accidentally, rebooting, the hard drive won't mount and I'm stuck in a terminal. When running fsck it aborts, saying that the buffer limit is reached at just above 5100000. Can someone help me reset fstab?
I'm using 12.04 64 bit.
Try booting from a live CD, mount the root partition, and run
When you're in the mounted partition, it can give you an idea if it is salvageable (i.e., if it just has a bunch of gibberish appended to it).Code:less etc/fstab
Wow. Can you use a live CD to run fsck?
The default fstab ion 12.04 looks like
but with your own/dev/sdx# names and UUIDs for the various partitions, and probably no final line for a floppy disk (shown in red).Code:# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=01b9131d-43fe-4b4e-be2b-b319de5a898a / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=1bfd912d-b6b6-4a68-9aaf-4139513772ec none swap sw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
If you have a separate /home partition you may need extra lines in the format
again with your own UUID for/home.Code:# /home was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=e2554df2-7e16-4864-97c9-834d8bebecda /home ext4 defaults 0 2
You can find your own UUIDs from a live system by runningand it may be worth trying your own UUID version of this fstab, if you can't edit out the gibberish that you added with a live CD, as suggested by cortman.Code:sudo blkid -c /dev/null
I don't think running fsck from a live system will help as there is no filesystem corruption to worry about, just an incorrect fstab which is not allowing the system to boot.
Thanks all! I've got it back up and everything seems to be working fine.