Boot issues: What todo when you muck up your FSTAB file

[Dagremote]

Greetings:

New Piner and forum member. Was adding an external previously formatted NTFS 1TB drive, and had issues getting read/write access. Managed to get the system into a non boot state. In the end, I managed to resolve the boot issue, but chose to switch to a new drive formatted with EXT3. No probs since.

In the interest of helping others, with a similar issue, here’s what I ended up doing. Will leave out what didn’t work, to keep the post shorter.

Didn’t have an actual spare Linux system, so I used a Vmware desktop system running Kali, running on my Win 10 laptop. The VM recognized USB devices, but didn’t recognize the larger micro USB caddy the memory card came with. Had to run out and by a new memory card that shipped with both a USB and larger memory card reader.

The Pine64 micro SD card mounted automatically on the Kali VM, and provided full access to the system folders. Ending the /etc/fstab file took seconds and Pine booted afterwards.

Thanks to some folks on the IRC channel for offering suggestions, everything came together in the end.

For those who have read this far, in the interest of sharing what my Pine is doing …

1.) Security system with Zoneminder
Running 3 cameras for now. External drive setup with symbolic links to hold the video.

2.) Local cloud with Owncloud
External drive setup as the main repository.

So far very positive things to say about the community and the product.

W.

[pfeerick]

New Piner and forum member. Was adding an external previously formatted NTFS 1TB drive, and had issues getting read/write access. Managed to get the system into a non boot state. In the end, I managed to resolve the boot issue, but chose to switch to a new drive formatted with EXT3. No probs since.

...

2.) Local cloud with Owncloud
External drive setup as the main repository.

Welcome! Glad the guys on the IRC were able to get your issues fixed Yes, playing with with /etc/fstab is always fraught with danger... doubly so on these SBCs unless you have a plan B for when it all goes wrong Thanks for giving some pointers for others for when they inevitably find out the hard way not the fiddle in /etc/fstab unless you know exactly what you're doing ! :-O Another plan B could be to load linux onto another microSD card, and then plug your misconfigured one into the pine64 via the USB reader. That is basically what I can do with my Cubietruck... if I ever stuff up the microSD card, I just pull it out, and boot from the backup OS installed on the onboard eMMC, and then mount and fix the SD card configuration. 

I'm doing the same with another SBC... but running Nextcloud instead of Owncloud. Pretty handy having my own private version of dropbox keeping all my boxes in sync