Mounting hard disk as RW from Live CD

[dojit]

Hi everyone,

Our FreeBSD Citrix Netscaler VM running under Hyper-V is failing to boot, it returns

ACPI autoload failed - no such file or directory

and restarts itself continually in a loop.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but for this error, I need to edit device.hints in /boot and add

hint.acpi.0.disabled=1 # disable ACPI (i386 only)

I've downloaded FreeBSD-9.3-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso. Booted into single user mode to the # prompt.

I perform a

mount /mnt /dev/ada0s1
cd mnt
ls

I can see the hard drive file system.

But when I try and do a ed or vi device.hints, the system returns

read only file system

How can I mount the offline hard disk as RW to edit device.hints?

Or is there another way to resolve this issue?

Thank you

 

[wblock@]

Booted from an install disk and the hard disk is still read-only? That happens when it is marked dirty. Make a full backup. Or two. Then, if fsck(8) can repair the filesystem, it can be mounted read/write.

There is still the question of what caused the problem, possibly a failing drive. And a lot of things depend on ACPI, so disabling it is probably not a cure.

 

[dojit]

Booted from an install disk and the hard disk is still read-only? That happens when it is marked dirty. Make a full backup. Or two. Then, if fsck(8) can repair the filesystem, it can be mounted read/write.

There is still the question of what caused the problem, possibly a failing drive. And a lot of things depend on ACPI, so disabling it is probably not a cure.

Thank you for the reply - I've checked the Logical Drive array where the virtual disk is located and there are no errors. I'll try fsck and see if it produces any issues.

 

[AntumDeluge]

I'm sorry if I'm hijacking a thread, but I'm having a similar problem. I can't seem to mount a partition at all from the live media. It says that the filesystem is dirty. But, then again I don't remember if I tried to mount it read-only. I'll have to try that later. Is there any way to run fsck on an unmounted filesystem?

--- Edit ---

Okay, I am able to mount it read-only, but I cannot use fsck on it. Is that because I am using boot-only media (FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img)?

# mount -o ro /dev/ada0p2 /mnt
WARNING: /mnt was not properly dismounted
# fsck /mnt
fsck: Could not determine filesystem type
# fsck -t ufs2 /mnt
fsck: exec fsck_ufs2 for /dev/ada0p2 in /sbin:/usr/sbin: No suck file or directory

--- Edit ---

Oh, I'm sorry. I was using the wrong filesystem type. It should have been fsck -t ufs.

My problem is solved, thank you:

# mount -o ro /dev/ada0p2 /mnt
# fsck -t ufs /mnt
# umount /mnt
# mount /dev/ada0p2 /mnt

 

[SirDice]

You don't need to mount the filesystem to be able to fsck(8) it. You can do it directly on the disk/partition: fsck /dev/ada0p2.

 

[dojit]

I'm sorry if I'm hijacking a thread, but I'm having a similar problem. I can't seem to mount a partition at all from the live media. It says that the filesystem is dirty. But, then again I don't remember if I tried to mount it read-only. I'll have to try that later. Is there any way to run fsck on an unmounted filesystem?

To mount the filesystem I had to use an earlier version of FreeBSD (8.1) and choose the 'fix it' option as per:
http://www.isysop.com/using-fixit-and-chroot-to-repair-a-non-booting-system/

But the FreeBSD VM still wouldn't boot despite editing the /boot/loader.conf and disabling ACPI

The boot failure issue was resolved by restoring a backup of the VM 6 months previous.