Editing fstab

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Editing fstab
started by: Ian "Bill" Morris

Posted by Ian "Bill" Morris on June 18 2004,12:47

I have done a hard disk install via floppy however with everything installed disk space is tight. I have plenty of ram so am going to forgo a swap partition (may create a swap file later)

This has however left me with 50mb of free space at the beginning of the Hard Disk which I have re-formatted to ext2

I have tried to ammend the fstab so that this is mounted as /home however when I re-boot dsl overwrites my changes and mounts it as /mnt/hda1

How do I stop this?

Cheers

Bill

Posted by CappyCaffeine on June 19 2004,20:50

Simplist way I can think of is to use bootlocal.sh

1. delete or rename /home
2. create symbolic link for /home to your /mnt/hda1

I.E. put these lines into your bootlocal.sh

mv /home /home-back
ln -s /mnt/hda1 /home

let me know if it works. I take no responsibility for the results!

Cappy

Posted by Ian "Bill" Morris on June 22 2004,16:27

Nice idea but unforunatly that is not going to work I am afriad. /dev/hda1 is not mounted at boot time but is user mountable. I suppose I could log in as root first then mount it but it is not an optimal solution. I really need to be able to ammend the fstab. Ah well back to the drawing board.

Posted by cbagger01 on June 23 2004,01:35

Why not resize your main partition to include the additional free disk space?

If you boot up a newer version of the KNOPPIX livecd, you can use qtparted to resize a partition:

(1) Boot up the KNOPPIX livecd
(2) Open up a terminal window.
(3) Type in the following:
sudo su
passwd
<Type in a 'root' passoword here>
exit
exit

Then choose QTPARTED from the user menu. Type in your recently created root password when prompted.

Good Luck.

Posted by Ian "Bill" Morris on June 25 2004,15:16

Unfortunatly the laptop has no cdrom. I had thought of this and looked into it using somthing like tomsrbt or another boot disk with gnuparted on but the free space is at the beginning of the disk as I had to do the cd-rom less install via floppys. And GNUparted cannot resize free space at the start of a partition. ie /dev/hda1 is free /dev/hda2 has dsl on it. The only way I can think to use the space is to edit the fstab.

Posted by roberts on June 25 2004,19:15

Quote

Nice idea but unforunatly that is not going to work I am afriad. /dev/hda1 is not mounted at boot time but is user mountable.

Why not try adding your mount command for hda1 at the beginning of the bootlocal.sh then trying Cappy's suggestions.

Posted by Ian "Bill" Morris on June 26 2004,14:29

Brilliant! That was exactly what I was looking for. I come from the redhat world and was wondering where the rc.local equivilent was. I have to admit my redhat expeirance made me assume that it would be under /etc rather than /opt but for DSL it makes sense!

Also I found that if you add the mount point above the #Added by KNOPPIX line in the fstab it doesn't get removed so I was able to mount /dev/hda1 as /home.

I will write up a full procedure for what I did and add it under the FAQ for CD-less installs.

Thanks Cappy, roberts, and cbagger01for your help :-)