Debian fstab woes

[arachnoid]

Hi guys,

I'm running Debian on a NAS device (NSLU2). I was having issues with swap performance so i bought an extra USB HDD. I switched the box on connected the device and formatted a swap partition on the new disk. Using swapon swapoff and a few other commands(can't remember what they were now) I got the swap file moved over to the new disk and the performance improved.

Next day I rebooted the box and it won't boot. I remove the new USB disk and turn it on and its all good again but the swap is back on the first disk. Now it dawns on me that i forgot to edit fstab. Not knowing anything about fstab and armed with pico I edited the file in a way that I thought might be right. Clearly a backup of fstab would have been a really good plan, but good plans always seem to present themselves after the event. Now my debian box won't boot regardless of which combination of disks it has running.

I have a linux box that can read / write the fstab on the usb disk using Fedora 8 or Kubuntu Gutsy so I'm not entirely up the famous creak.

Are there any good resources I could use to understand fstab, particularly where it applies to debian and USB disks if there are differences.

I'm determined to learn something from this idiocy of mine.

Cheers,

Russell

 

[.walls]

fstab is fairly simple:

/dev/sdXX  swap swap defaults 0 0

should do the job. (of course you'll need to change sdXX to fit your box)

the first part is the block device node (or remote file system), the second is the mount point, the third is the type of file system, the next are mount options and the last two digits are for filesystem dump and fsck.

man fstab

will probably tell you more than you want to know

 

[arachnoid]

Thanks for that.

Back up and running now. The new disk isn't working yet but at least i have a bootable system and a Backup of fstab now.

I'll keep playing to get the other disk running right

Russ