[SOLVED] Fresh install read only file system

Question

I just did a fresh install of Arch this morning, and I have been trying to fix it most of the day. I was following the Beginner's Guide in the wiki as close as I could. (There were a couple items that didn't quite match up.) I only edited the files that it told me to, and then just minor edits. I checked out /etc/fstab during the process and noticed that none of my hard drives were present. I didn't think this was normal, so I opened another terminal and grabbed the UUIDs with ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/. I have two hard drives, but only sda1 (/) and sda2 (swap) showed up. (sdb1 is the entire second hard drive as /home.) Here is the default fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cd auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/fl auto user,noauto 0 0
The example documentation indicated that the file should have lines similair to...
/dev/disk/by-uuid/6334340b-87f1-406e-a777-13210ba85887 / ext3 defaults,noatime,nodirtime 0 1
/dev/disk/by-uuid/5ffd6a40-6d72-4710-82af-ae894e557f89 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/32935c6c-6b75-4039-6b69-21f8b805e8f8 /home ext3 defaults,noatime,nodirtime 0 2
...but then I found an example while searching around that showed the lines like this:
UUID=6334340b-87f1-406e-a777-13210ba85887 / ext3 defaults,noatime,nodirtime 0 1
UUID=5ffd6a40-6d72-4710-82af-ae894e557f89 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=32935c6c-6b75-4039-6b69-21f8b805e8f8 /home ext3 defaults,noatime,nodirtime 0 2
In the first scenario, everything boots like normal, but when I tried to do anything that required writing to disk, the operation failed with a message about the file system being read-only. (I was trying to edit some config files because I couldn't get online.) Mind you, I was working as root the whole time, because I hadn't even gotten to adding a user yet. The only way I could make changes was to boot a live cd, mount, edit, reboot. remember to remove the live cd, reboot again, repeat.
In the second version of fstab, the bootup process kept trying to check the disk for errors. When it was done it wanted to reboot. Then it tried to check again (presumably because it couldn't save the fact that it had already checked).
I am at a loss. I really wish to use Arch Linux. I've been baby-fed for quite a while on Ubuntu, but it always ran slow. Please somebody help me! I am happy to provide more information; just let me know what you need.
Last edited by ravinggenius (2008-07-05 18:33:22)

Answer 1

Thank you so much for pointing out that typo! Turns out that is what was wrong. Well plus two of uuids had one typo each....
Also from what I can tell it doesn't matter which format I use for the uuids in fstab. I will use the UUID=xxxxx... version unless somebody can tell me why I shouldn't.