So what particular repairs should the partition tool enable you to do? The repair tools are "manual" for experts that know what they are doing. They can be used when the system is smashed (won't boot, won't mount, etc) to get the system back to a state where it finally will boot, and partitions will mount etc. An example... the MBR gets clobbered (somehow related to M$, I spare you) and your machine will now not boot into GRUB and you can't bring up your
In my case, I had moved partitions around using Partition Manager, but leaving the contents the same. I could edit /etc/fstab to accommodate the changes (and have done so in the past), but since I didn't have a fully running system it would have been easier to use the partition tool if it did what I wanted. Not easier, and maybe not possible.
The greying out of the mount points, by the way, also caused this catch-22: the tool would not let me save its changes because there was no root partition, but I couldn't specify the root partition because I couldn't assign the "/" mount point to it. The tool is completely not necessary. Boot the system in single user mode (run level 1) or use the DVD expert tools (still run level 1), mount the root
On Monday 18 September 2006 23:56, Paul Abrahams wrote: linux box.... you can use the repair tools to rebuild the MBR. Another example.... your machine will boot but won't run properly because your /var partition (reiserfs) has a corrupted tree do to an unclean shutdown. You can use the tools to bring the machine up with all partitions unmounted so that you can reiserfsck --rebuild-tree on the var partition.... Most of the "repairs" are going to be manual corrections that will fix the reason why the system will not boot, or will not mount, or will not go into run level 3 etc. The repair tools are not meant to be used by newbies, non technical people, etc. You would probably do well to find a friend at your local LUG and get some help with the tools before your system is complete trash. Otherwise, I agree with the earlier post... backup what you can and reload. partition, and then edit /etc/fstab with vi. Its been said before, but maybe needs repeating, the mount points are nothing more or less than text entries in a text file called /etc/fstab. The repair tools will allow you to have a working system that will allow you to mount and edit the file in /etc that is broken; in this case fstab. The fstab file is one of the easiest of the config files to understand and edit. Fix the file manually with vi and then reboot your system. What's the problem? I am going to have to try this myself just for fun... but I suspect that the reason the entries are greyed out is that the partitions mount points SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED. It may be trying to help you. Usually once the system has been installed and running, changing the mount points of the partitions will cause the system to fail... unless you have done some very fancy resizing and reshuffling... in which case, you won't have any trouble at all manually modifying your fstab to match your fancy shuffling..... its tricky at best and not for newbies.... again, sounds like you will be better off reloading your system. And I agree... no bug here. -- Kind regards, M Harris <><