FC2 won't boot--dumb automount

[siplus]

when i installed FC2, i set it up to automount /dev/hda3 to /win. this was when hda3 did not have anything on it, but now i just reinstalled windows and now FC2 won't boot becaue it can't mount hda3 so it drops me into a console. mounting it myself won't do any good because when i drop out of the console it will reboot and obviously i will have to do it again...

at this point i don't careif it automounts it or not, i just want FC2 to boot up. so my first question: from that recovery console that it drops me into on bootup, how do i disable this automount?

also, what kind of grub entry do i need to make to bootup windows on hda3? i can check this out later when i have the time, but if you are feeling chatty i would love to have the help.

right now my computer is useless because of that dumb automount... i would just like to completely remove that automount--i have no problems with manual mounting.

[chartoo]

Could the problem be that you are using /dev/hda3 instead of /mnt/hda3 ?

[Void Main]

Where did you configure this "automount"? Normally you add an entry to your /etc/fstab to mount any partitions you want to mount, which will mount them when you boot. "Automount" is usually what you want to do to a removable device such as a CD, Zip drive, Camera, etc. Now if you put it in the proper place (/etc/fstab) even if you did something wrong and it can't mount it should not drop you to a maintenance shell. This usually only happens if you do an unclean shutdown and there are errors on the disk. Your win partition entry in your /etc/fstab should look something like this if /dev/hda3 is an NTFS:

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/dev/hda3               /win                      ntfs    ro,umask=0222   0 0


You are sure hda3 is your Win partition? You are using a "0" in the last field in the entry above (fsck options)?

Now assuming it is dropping you to a shell and you just want to comment out the line in your /etc/fstab you'll have to drop to a maintenance shell, remount your root file system in read/write mode (it will probably be read-only when you drop to a maintenance shell), edit the /etc/fstab, comment out the "/win" line and then exit the shell:

Enter root's password to get a maintenance shell at the prompt then:

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# mount / -o remount,rw
# vi /etc/fstab


Comment out the "/win" line, save it, exit the shell and it should reboot without mounting the partition.

A little secret, get the line right in your /etc/fstab so you can mount it and unmount it cleanly using just the mount point name (directory) before you reboot:

# mount /win
# umount /win

If your win partition is NTFS you obviously need to have NTFS support in your kernel. If your win partition is FAT32 then use "vfat" instead of "ntfs" in your /etc/fstab entry.

Of course you can also boot from the rescue CD (or KNOPPIX, etc), mount your root partition, and edit your fstab or whatever other file you've hosed. And if it were me I would blow away the proprietary NTFS garbage and format it ext3 or something more useful.