Gparted has messed up mount points - Solved

[The Liquidator]

Can anyone help with this please?

I had 5 partitions on my HDD (self explanatory terms)

Virtual sda1
Data sda2
/ sda5
home sda6
swap

From within kubuntu, using gparted, I deleted sda1 and resized sda2, the purpose being to make the best use of the available free-space. Whilst the operation was successful, the mount point (Data) was lost, and I found no way within gparted of assigning a mount point to the partition. Worse, the operation seems to have removed key information relating to the others too with the result that on reboot the file system check fails. It seems my fstab file may have got messed up.

I have tried using the live CD. If I try the installation routine, I can assign mount points to the various partitions without formatting - that is with the exception of root. As my system no longer bears any relationship to a new 9.04 install I would like to avoid that if I can. The partitions themselves are there and Okay. In the live CD I can see them and navigate my way through the directories. My question is - is there some utility I can use from the command line that will enable me to recover this?

Thanks in advance

Edit: Here is my (very weird) fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=b133a2f8-36d4-402a-a1cc-d463f7c321a6 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /Data was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=c659be87-4631-4475-ba75-d36132faf2f7 /Data ext3 relatime 0 2
# /Virtual was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=f698013e-5397-49f7-982f-d8a12aa453b7 /Virtual ext3 relatime 0 2
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=6c9e67c9-8a07-42d0-8cf0-e03bbcf6c06a /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=4dfa54b3-e841-4752-b1cb-3d9d57f3f724 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

[ukchucktown]

Re: Gparted has messed up mount points

One item to eliminate as a cause is changes to UUIDs. If you can't boot without a live CD that would be number one on my checklist. I'd expect to observe GRUB problems too. Grub uses UUIDs in the menu.lst file.

I had a similar problem after doing a restore from backup. I use dump to backup file systems. After testing an upgrade to Karmic I restored my old system. To make it easy, I just reformatted my root partition and did the restore. Of course, that changed the UUID so I got GRUB errors then mount problems. The fix was easy after I figured out the problem. You can use /sbin/vol_id to get the UUIDs or your partitions.

[flarson]

Re: Gparted has messed up mount points

When you deleted sda1 and expanded sda2, did sda2 become sda1? Filesystems do not contain mount points. Fstab associates filesystems with mountpoints. Run

blkid

and then associate mountpoints with fielsystem sin /etc/fstab.

When resizing filesystems it is a good idea to run fsck on them afterward. It would be a good idea to comment the modified filesystem in fstab, boot, run fsck on the modified filesystem, uncomment it in fstab, mount it.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Gparted has messed up mount points - Solved

Thanks for the input. I did a duplicate post on the ubuntu forum and got a reply that pointed out that gparted had not messed up, I had!

However, I was given some useful info, which was how to get the system to display from a command prompt all the UUIDs.

That gave me 4 UUIDs which were identical to those shown in my fstab file.

I edited fstab to

Remove the entry for the Virtual disk and

On all the others I edited the commented out lines so that as an example

# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation

now reads

/dev/sda5

Bingo! I am up and running again, so the issue is solved, I am pleased to say. That has saved me hours.

[Snowhog]

Re: Gparted has messed up mount points - Solved

From within kubuntu,...

Which is why I always recommend doing such partition management from (in this case) the GParted LiveCD. It's always risky managing partitions from within a running session.

Glad that you got it straitened out. Please return to your OP and click the modify button and add SOLVED to the subject line.