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editing mtab

 
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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers editing mtab
# 1  
Old 12-29-2001
editing mtab
Hi all and Happy New Year!!

I'm teaching myself Unix on two Linux boxes (one Red Hat, one SuSE). Anyway, I downloaded and installed patches and fixes for my SuSE box and now I can't mount my cdrom as a user. An error pops up:

Could not mount
mount according to mtab, /dev/hdc is mounted on /dev/hdc
mount failed

Initally the error included fstab (and I couldn't mount as root) but I was able to figure that one out.

Can someone please first tell me what entry I should put in my mtab file so I can once again mount my cdrom as a user? And secondly explain to what fstab and mtab files are used for (if possible, relate them to files used by windows and/or dos)?

I have a few teach yourself books but they don't have mtab in their indexes...

Thank you.
# 2  
Old 12-30-2001
There is no reason to edit mtab.... it is automatically generated... However, I do recall a few occasions when it has been corrupted and I needed to delete the entries. From the mount man page:

Code:
       The programs mount and umount maintain a list of currently mounted file systems
       in  the  file  /etc/mtab.   If  no  arguments  are given to mount, this list is
       printed.  When the proc  filesystem  is  mounted  (say  at  /proc),  the  files
       /etc/mtab  and /proc/mounts have very similar contents. The former has somewhat
       more information, such as the mount options used, but is not necessarily up-to-
       date  (cf.  the -n option below). It is possible to replace /etc/mtab by a sym-
       bolic link to /proc/mounts, but some information is lost that way, and in  par-
       ticular  working  with the loop device will be less convenient. Also, pathnames 
        containing  spaces  are  handled  correctly  by  /etc/mtab  but  not  (yet)  by
       /proc/mounts.

-n     Mount  without writing in /etc/mtab.  This is necessary for example when 
         /etc is on a read-only file system.


FILES
       /etc/fstab file system table
       /etc/mtab table of mounted file systems
       /etc/mtab~ lock file
       /etc/mtab.tmp temporary file

 
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