On Sunday I was attempting to free up a partition on one of my internal hard drives for data storage. I previously had three Linux OS partitions in addition to Win XP. Since I'm running out of storage and I have little spare time, I figure I could do with two Linux partitions instead of three. That way, I can stick with PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) as my primary distro (for now) and play with another distro on the other partition that's set aside for Linux.
I used the PCLinuxOS Control Center to try to reformat the extra partition as a vfat32 partition in order to easily share data with Windows. (Right now ntfs write support in Linux is not entirely stable; but, it's almost there.) However, when I exited and rebooted, PCLOS gave a "bad superblocks" error on the hard drive containing the partition.
I eventually circumvented the problem by reformatting the partition using Win XP, then rebooted into PCLOS. Then when I encountered the error, I entered the root password to get to the shell. I then edited the /etc/fstab file to remove the lines with the obsolete partitions that were causing the OS to error. After rebooting again, the errors were gone and I was back up and running. It seems that the PCLOS Control Center did not update my fstab properly for some reason.
Remember to back up data when playing with hard drive partitions.
I'd like to note, though, that this is the first time I've had such a problem with PCLOS. So far, it's been a solid OS and the Linux distribution that I've been using for the past nine months or so.
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