On Saturday, June 25, 2005 @ 5:10 PM Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sunday 26 June 2005 02:56, Greg Wallace wrote:
Thanks for the info. I went into partitioner in YAST and this entry did not show up. The only place that partition was referenced was in fstab. There was entry in /dev for the partition at one time, but I had manually deleted it a day or two before (don't ask me why). What would happen if I were to delete an entry out of fstab for, say, my root partition. My system would not even boot at that point, isn't that right?
If you delete the file from /dev it wouldn't. But why would you do that?
Ok. Here's a quick explanation of what got me into this. I uninstalled this 3rd party software and tried to do a clean re-install. This software didn't clean up after itself properly and left the logical volume entry in /dev. At that time, I didn't know that it had a built-in utility that would clean that out, so, in order to get that entry out of dev, I simply deleted it. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong), I could have gone to partitioner and it would have shown up there, at which point I could have deleted it with the partitioner and it would have both removed the /dev entry and cleaned up fstab. Anyway, since I didn't do it that way, I was stuck with cleaning up fstab, which is what I ended up doing.
If you delete the entry from fstab, the system would still boot. The root device is only partially set in fstab, the crucial place where the root device is set is the kernel parameter root= which you can find in your boot
loader configuration, probably /boot/grub/menu.lst
But that doesn't mean it's a particularly good idea
All other partitions other than root would fail to get mounted automatically on boot if you delete the entry from fstab
Got it! Ok, this is something for my Linux reference file.
This is a pretty critical table for SuSE Linux (maybe any Linux), isn't it (or not)?
Yes, for all unix versions (although the name varies. e.g. in Solaris it's called vfstab)
Is there a particular format for the entries in the table, or could they just be delimited by a single space and it still work? Looks like right now they are tab delimited.
The fields are "white space" delimited, which means they can have any number of tabs and spaces between them (well, there may be a limit, but it's not something you'd run into if you keep it sane)
Yes there is a format. It is described in the man page for fstab
I didn't see it in there, but I was scanning for different types of info. I'll go back and look at it in more detail Thanks, Greg Wallace