How to make my mounted root read/write without a /dev entry?

Neil Hoggarth njh at kernighan.demon.co.uk
Sun Feb 24 11:03:08 GMT 2002


On Sun, 24 Feb 2002, Clark C . Evans wrote:

>   How can I make my root partition read/write so that
>   I can MAKEDEV?  The usual way, "mount -a" won't work
>   for obvious reasons... my root partition does not have
>   a device entry.  I also tried "mount -u -w / " to no avail.

If you have a FreeBSD CD set then boot from disk 2, then in sysinstall
choose the "Fixit" menu item. This should allow you to mount your root
partition as /mnt, and manipulate it, while using the installation mfsroot
as a temporary root filesystem.

If you don't have the CDs then you can do the same sort of thing with
boot floppies. Go to

  ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.5-RELEASE/floppies/

(or some suitable mirror thereof) and fetch fixit.flp, kern.flp,
mfsroot.flp and the README file. Use the flp images to create floppies as
outlined in the README file, boot from the kern.flp disk, feed it the
mfsroot.flp disk when prompted, then choose Fixit in sysinstall and feed
it the fixit.flp disk.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Neil Hoggarth,
Oxford.






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