Hello all,
I have a release candidate of 11.0 running
on a Dell Desktop beautifully…
I recently used a usb adapter w/ a SD Card
to install a Ubuntu Image for my OLPC…it
wasn’t working directly from the XO laptop
probably because of my card, and it worked
fine 1st time on my Opensuse Desktop.
When I rebooted today though, it kept
throwing me into some recovery console
.because it couldn’t locate the USB device
connected.
I had to go in and remove that line from
/etc/fstab, rebooted and it was fine…
Isn’t this kind of a show-stopper for someone
with about a day’s knowledge less than mine?
What is the theory behind this check in the
booting process?
Just trying to learn,
-ajm
If you have added an entry for the USB disk to /etc/fstab, perhaps with the partitioner, then you made a mistake, which you have succesfully corrected!
So in future just hotplug the USB drive in, allowing the desktop environment to mount it for the files, rather than boot with the drive connected and mess with fstab(5) or YaST Partitioner tool.
The “theory” for checks, is that you asked for it when you made an entry for the USB disk! There’s an option to turn off backup and verification (the numbers at end 5th and 6th field) changing “1 2” to “0 0”.
The defaults are correct, in that usually people care about their data, and it is better to find out about problems sooner rather than later.
On my Sister’s XP box, a bad block or two, developed into a corrupted NTFS C: drive, which later required me to recover via CD and figure out, that running checkdsk with the right options (suggested by a Linux command on a recovery CD incidentally).
Most PC users would probably have to take the machine into a dealer, possibly via a salesman trying to sell them this years model.
So whilst it can be inconvenient when the PC Operating System checks things, actually it is good that it does, and in long run saves time and money.
Makes sense!
I did have to setup the SD Card as
a bootable, drive, so I can see why
this happened…
I guess I was thinking of it as a
plug-and-play, whereas I had
turned it into a filesystem w/
Linux on it, the computer was
halting for what it though was
a valid reason…
Just caught me off guard this
morning…
Thanks for the info, I’m
trying to become more involved
in the community and this is
important knowledge on that
road!
Thanks!
-ajm
Oh how courageous! That’s something I’ve not messed with up to now, though I’d like to do that at some point for a solid state only SOHO server/firewall. But SSD’s using multicell flash aren’t quite there yet, and single cell flash drives are too expensive.
If you weren’t booting openSuSE from the SD card, then I don’t think you needed to add it to /etc/fstab, rather than hotplug and ensure the drive was unmounted, so long as you new the device name.
That said, perhaps you were definitely wise not to stray from the HOWTO you had, may be you could suggest them to note the improvements to the options.
Using “noauto,default” and “0 0” to avoid boot problems for non-permanent disks like USB, Compact flash, SD etc drives, similar to Windows partitions that are needed only occasionally.
You could also have retained the line in fstab and had it set to not be mounted and/or checked; having the device in fstab can be desirable if it is to be used in a persistent, albeit portable, fashion mounted to the same mount point. Alternatively, udev can handle the device on-the-fly when attached, in which case fstab is not used and the udev rules will determine its transient mount point, which in openSUSE is under /media (e.g., /media/disk).
I think that this type of information is great…
If I never had monitor issues, I’d never know
about X11, or if my network wasn’t jacked
up in the past, I’d never learned about /etc/network
or Network Manager…
These are the details that most never have to
learn about, but I’m just glad I’m starting to
get it!
As for the SD Card, OLPC Forums just assume
you’ll be doing these commands from the XO…
It was funny it took a day trying on the XO,
took the lunch break on a desktop and
w/ capable Ram on 11.1 RC…
Thanks for all your help! I know better now!