Mount fails on boot

Question

In fstab, I have 3 logical volumes being mounted, one for /, one for /home, and one for swap. On boot I see that / and /home are being mounted OK, then I see

"Remounting root filesystem in read-write mode"

completing OK and then I get

Mounting local filesystems: mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Judging from the order in fstab, it's the swap that fails. Also when I run mount -l, that mount is not there. mount -a returns the same message with no extra info.

I tried commenting out the line in fstab but that doesn't seem to affect anything somehow?

Here is the suspect line:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_swap swap swap defaults 0 0

Answer 1

A swap partition is not mounted with a mount -a - you can see it by doing a "free" command and looking at the last line - which is the amount of swap. that said, the problem is most unlikely to be with your swap, as that line looks correct.

You may want to post your fstab table so we can have a look, but if everything is mounting I would not worry about it, and I would be inclined to put it down to an error in a startup script.

Answer 2

I did track it down to the line that mounts the VMWare tools ISO (this is a VM). The -v (verbose) and -t (type) options for the mount were very useful for debugging.

The following will attempt to mount all entries in /etc/fstab in verbose mode - which will print each one with a message indicating the result:

mount -a -v

You can also mount a subset of the entries in /etc/fstab. The following mounts all ext4 entries:

mount -v -t ext4

Finally, /etc/mtab on mount -l will list everything that's currently mounted.