Reformatted secondary HD, now booting gets stuck on reiserfsck

[Warp]

I have a secondary hard disc connected to this PC, which is from my previous PC. It was formatted as a reiserfs partition.

Since I could use that additional disk space also in Windows, I decided to reformat it as an NTFS partition (from Windows). I made the mistake of not removing that partition from OpenSuse’s settings before doing that.

Now booting to OpenSuse hangs on an infinite reiserfsck loop. It just repeats an error about not finding a reiserfs partition on the disk over and over. (Ok, I don’t know if it’s actually an infinite loop, but it continues for as long as I care to wait.)

I can’t figure any way around it. Booting to safe mode doesn’t help. It doesn’t seem to be possible to skip or interrupt the check. I have an OpenSuse installation DVD, but I don’t know what to do with it (it has a rescue boot option, but it just boots to a very ascetic mode; while I’m a decently experienced linux/unix user, unfortunately I’m not so experienced as a linux admin as to know what to do from there).

Perhaps there’s some way of telling grub to skip reiserfsck or trying to mount that disc that isn’t a reiserfs anymore? Any other suggestions?

[wolfi323]

@Warp

Perhaps there’s some way of telling grub to skip reiserfsck or trying to mount that disc that isn’t a reiserfs anymore? Any other suggestions?

I would suggest to add “init=/bin/sh” to the kernel command line.
Press ‘e’ at the boot menu, look for the line starting with “linux” and append it at the end, then press ‘F10’ to boot.

This should get you to a minimal text mode session where you should be able to edit /etc/fstab and remove the offending entry.

Or boot from the installation DVD, select “Recue system”, mount your root partition and remove the entry there.

[hcvv]

@Warp

I have a secondary hard disc connected to this PC, which is from my previous PC. It was formatted as a reiserfs partition.

Since I could use that additional disk space also in Windows, I decided to reformat it as an NTFS partition (from Windows). I made the mistake of not removing that partition from OpenSuse’s settings before doing that.

Now booting to OpenSuse hangs on an infinite reiserfsck loop. It just repeats an error about not finding a reiserfs partition on the disk over and over. (Ok, I don’t know if it’s actually an infinite loop, but it continues for as long as I care to wait.)

I can’t figure any way around it. Booting to safe mode doesn’t help. It doesn’t seem to be possible to skip or interrupt the check. I have an OpenSuse installation DVD, but I don’t know what to do with it (it has a rescue boot option, but it just boots to a very ascetic mode; while I’m a decently experienced linux/unix user, unfortunately I’m not so experienced as a linux admin as to know what to do from there).

Perhaps there’s some way of telling grub to skip reiserfsck or trying to mount that disc that isn’t a reiserfs anymore? Any other suggestions?

My assumption is that you forgot to change your /etc/fstab to the new situation. It thus still tells the system to mount the reiserfs file sysem that exists no more.

Every rescue CD/DVD will allow you to edit /etc/fstab and remove that line from it.

[Warp]

@wolfi323

I would suggest to add “init=/bin/sh” to the kernel command line.

I was able to remove the line from /etc/fstab using that trick (after figuring out how to use vi, given that emacs wasn’t starting in this mode). Now everything is working fine again.

Thanks.

[gogalthorp]

For future reference think that nano or joe is installed by default either which is much more beginner friendly then vi lol!

[brunomcl]

This just reminded me to install mc (midnight commander). Great newbie-friendly terminal file manager/editor for just this kind of situation - boot to a terminal, type “mc”, and voilá.