System start-up failure after editing original fstab file

Hello All,

After reading a number of posts about how to prolong the life of the Aspire's SSD (through the use of tmpfs and noatime), I thought it would be a good idea to create some temporary file storage (tmpfs) on my new beastie (running the orginal OS + live updates applied).

Noticing the /tmp directory was commented out in the original fstab file below and being cautious, I decided to edit the file (sudo mousepad fstab), remove the comment (#), and reboot. My aim was to reduce SSD IO by moving temporary files to memory.

/dev/sda1 / ext2 defaults,noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
#none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0

Net result: black screen of death with an X marking the spot and no where to go (apart from a new reinstall, which I undertook without a hitch).

All this hassle from the below change:

none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

My questions are:

1) Is this a known problem? As I cannot see anything wrong with the change, I can only assume that some unknown system/application dependency got in the way.

2) Are there any other circumstances where the use of a tmpfs in the fstab file will result in an unsuccessful boot (e.g. will it work for /var/log)? FYI – I plan not to setup a tmpfs for /var/tmp/ because some of the tempory files created in this directory may need to be preserved between reboots.

3) If this is a bug, is there a work around? Or have I done something foolish?

4) Also, will there be any SSD IO benefits in adding noatime (mount option) to the SWAP partition?

5) Finally, is there any way to recover from the black screen of death without doing a complete reinstall?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Alex

 

If you read this thread, you'll see that /tmp is already loaded in tmpfs and it isn't done through fstab. So you didn't need to do what you did with the original fstab and doing so is causing your problem ...

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5136&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10

You'll either need to restore your system OR boot some live version of Linux from a flash key and go and edit your fstab, once again commenting out that line.

Cheers.