[FSF Associate Member] View Annang Sowah's profile on LinkedIn

Thursday 6 November 2014

[SOLVED] Mount and make a Linux Root Partition/Filesystem writable with EASE in seconds.

Pheeeeew! what a relief I have now :(


Background: This evening I was installing the new Android Studio IDE which required my setting of some JAVA OS-level environmental variables i.e. JAVA_HOME. This I did in the bashrc file in my user home directory and later realized that I messed up the very important bashrc file which was needed for login initializations  on my beloved Ubuntu desktop pc.
I hence couldn't log into my computer and decided to share how I fixed it in simple steps!

Recommendation: The solution below helps you have access to the file system to fix issues related to fstab, boot partition mishaps, GUI crash fixes etc.


1. From my Linux box I logged to the recovery mode(admin console) which was   successful.

2. I had the challenge of writing to or editing my "embattled" bashrc file because the whole file system was in a read-only mode - even with my logged-on administrator privileges.

3. I had to make my root file system writable by remounting it with the appropriate flags as snapped below:




mount -o remount,rw /                                                                        

4. With this done, I proceeded to undo whatever changes I made to my system
    earlier i.e. to delete a line I added to my bashrc file which triggered the mess.
    I had to edit the bashrc file as a privileged user using pico a special text
    editor on linux. You can use other great text editors if available on-system
    e.g. vi,vim, nano etc.
 





sudo pico /home/ ...user... /.bashrc                                                                     
or  just
pico /home/..user.../.bashrc                                                                                 



5. I now proceeded to fix the wrong entries I made in the bashrc file opened below












6. I saved my entries and got to the graphical login console by starting the xwindow linux GUI .




startx

7. That's all, best of luck :)