Hardcoded UUID partition in fstab, then removed partition. Need to edit fstab without osmc starting

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

I have a similar problem, that I may have resolved, but I have no USB keyboard [apart from wireless one that doesn’t seem to work with RPi/OSMC

So, I have hard-coded mounts in fstab, then removed partition from spoken hard drive yesterday in rush, before thinking I should remove mount point … now OSMC denies to start.

No wired USB keyboard, editing UUID in windows may get it unusable [ How to Change the Disk Signature of a Drive Without Losing Existing Data or Reformatting (howtohaven.com) ]

What is the best idea?

thanks

2

If OSMC won’t boot because you need to remove UUID from fstab, then your only option is probably gonna be to insert the SDCard into another Linux machine so that you can access the ext4 partition on the card and edit the fstab file.

3

What was on the partition? Short of something important like the root fs I have never heard of a missing partition stopping the boot process.

But for your fix you can just use a Linux system or a live environment to edit the fstab.

4

I did try to use Live Linux tho I couldn’t find fstab on a SD card, isn’t it in image?

5

It is certainly on the ext4 partition of the sdcard in etc/.

6

@ActionA @shadow

yeah Live CD was the solution, previously I was looking on a wrong partition :flushed:

Removing UUID input in fstab solved the problem

it looked like this [screen borrowed]

https://discourse.osmc.tv/uploads/default/773/723359e990119ea3.jpg

7

From another thread regarding the same issue -

it’s recommended to make sure you always add the nofail option as one of the mount options. This tells the system that this is not considered to be an “essential” drive, thus it will still boot up (but with an error) if the drive can’t be found.

8

Yes, additional partitions in fstab that are marked auto but not marked as nofail will cause the system to boot to emergency mode if they can’t be mounted - this includes an external USB media drive that is manually mounted in fstab.

However since the September update when the system boots to emergency mode you will go directly to a root shell so provided you have a keyboard plugged in you could edit /etc/fstab from there to solve the problem.