Re: Re: Re: Re: Mount failed: Invalid argument
>All the above said, I'm not entirely clear on
what your actual problem
>is. Why do you need to mount an extra filesystem
by hand from the
>installer?
Thanks to all for the advice so far. I'm not
trying to mount any "extra" filesystem. I'm trying
to mount the root, and the Debian installer won't
let me. After partitioning the disk (a standard
boot partition, swap partition, and root partition
setup), initializing all partitions, and
activating the swap partition, the next step the
installer displays is the following:
You must mount your root filesystem ("/") before
you can mount any other file systems. Would you
like to mount /dev/hda3 as the root filesystem?
I answer "Yes"
The system always comes back with: "Mount failed:
invalid argument"
The installer doesn't display the command line, so
I have no idea what argument is invalid. At that
point, I can't continue until I mount the root,
and the installer won't do that, so the only thing
I can do is power off. Or try the command line.
> 'mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3
/wherever/you/want/to/put/it', if it's a
> standard Linux filesystem.
Maybe explaining in detail what I have done at the
command line will help clarify things. The Debian
installation program can't mount the root
partition because it contains an invalid argument,
so I went to the command prompt. According to the
install doc, I'm supposed to mount partition 3 as
the root. So following the syntax above, I tried:
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /
(read mount hda3 as root ??)
The result was:
Mounting /dev/hda3 on / failed: Invalid
argument
Since that is not valid syntax, I thought, well,
the above explanation doesn't match the syntax
anyway. If the last part of the command is
wherever/you/want/to/put/it" then where I want to
mount it is in the third partition, that is, hda3,
and what I want to put there is the root
directory, so the last 2 parts of the command must
be reversed. Right? So I tried:
mount -t ext2 / /dev/hda3
(read mount root on hda3 ??)
The result was:
Mounting / on /dev/hda3 failed: Block device
required
whatever that means. But at least the argument is
valid this time. Hmmm...
When I went to the command prompt, the Debian
installation program states onscreen that:
The hard disk filesystems are mounted under
"/target"
Which, of course, is not true, because nothing is
mounted yet at all. So I looked at the
installation doc, and it states:
If you are mounting a root partition for your
new system, just mount it to /target
OK. So I tried an "ls" command, and sure enough
there was a directory named /target. But why would
the hard disk filesystems be mounted under a
directory on the CD anyway? It makes no sense to
me to mount a directory on the CD, but it says I
should, and no examples of syntax are provided, so
I tried:
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /target
The result was:
Mounting /dev/hda3 on /target failed: Invalid
argument
But wait a minute, it says I am supposed to mount
(the root) to /target, so I tried:
mount -t ext2 / /target
which resulted in:
Mounting / on /target failed: Invalid argument
So as you can see, I've been following directions
to the letter, but the directions themselves are
very vague, and either don't work or don't make
sense.
I've been reading a number of different
installation advice pages, some extremely well
written, but they all have one fatal flaw - they
all assume that every step in the process will go
as planned. None of them have anything on
troubleshooting when things don't happen as they
are supposed to. I'll try finding and reading info
about the mount command for now. It seems that
somehow I'll have to mount the root from the
command line, but without knowing what "invalid
argument" the installation
program itself is using, it's pretty frustrating
to troubleshoot.
This is the point at which I'm stuck. Can anyone
point the way out?
Doug
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