On Oct 15, 2010, at 17:02, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Don't you fix the initial problem with a 'rescue' image?  Seem to recall
> doing this several times before on a variety on version of
> RedHat/Fedora/Scientific Linux.  Or am I misunderstanding?

Not unless I'm as well. Of course you don't even need a rescue disk, nor the root password, if you just know the grub password. ;-)

	Stephan

> 
> 	Martin.
> -- 
> Martin Bly
> RAL Tier1 Fabric Manager
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:owner-scientific-
>> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Larry Linder
>> Sent: Friday, October 15, 2010 1:51 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Replacing Hard Disks with a logical disk names.
>> 
>> A simple problem that I had done for years, turned  out to be
> difficult due to
>> a mistake I made and what I believe is an error in the Linux OS.
>> How you set it up is to forget to remove the logical drive from
> "/etc/fstab"
>> in the past it was never a problem.
>> But in SL 5.5 it is a serious problem because during boot it can't
> find the
>> drive name.  It drops you to a maintenance level and all you used to
> do in
>> put in the root pass word, edit the files etc.
>> What happen now:
>> put in your password
>> "bash  /usr/bin/id:   no such file or dir"
>> "bash  [: =: unary operator expected"
>> "bash  /usr/bin/id:"
>> "bash [: =: unary operator expected"
>> "bash /usr/bin/kpg-config: no such file or dir"
>>> repair file system1
>> As a result you can do nothing because your passwd has been rejected.
>> 
>> You are back to using your install disks. It recognizes un initialized
> disks
>> and initializes them - do a new install and set up disks and disk
> names and
>> do not format anything, except new disk,  setup root / passwd, set up
>> internet, do not install any thing.   and it knows there is an active
> OS
>> present and the install aborts.
>> 
>> The system reboots and runs normally everthing is preserved all
> because some
>> security nit modified the code and never checked the end result.
>> Sometime you can be so secure that the system becomes worthless.
>> 
>> What used to be a simple thing of replacing disks has now been
> difficult at
>> best.
>> What I fixed is to get rid of the logical names in in the fstab and
> went back
>> to the /dev/sda1 etc.   This was done because I didn't have a good way
> to
>> look at disks and their names but knew the hardware.
>> 
>> For back up on paper you need to do "df" and pipe it to lpr, keep in
> you file
>> folder as a true back up.
>> 
>> You can easily create this problem by simply unplugging a disk and
> trying a
>> reboot.
>> 
>> I have three backups but I never had a disk that was good but the
> electronics
>> became intermittent as a function of temperature.  suspect a bad
> solder joint
>> or circuit trace crack somewhere.   The symptom was a nice running
> drive that
>> was sluggish.   A reboot solved the problem but the failures began to
>> increase.   Users don't seem to understand a system being down.
>> Some of these boxes are shut down ever six months for cleaning.
>> 
>> Disks being cheep it time to install a new one and toss the old one.
>> 
>> Larry Linder
> --
> Scanned by iCritical.

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany