Bug 170895

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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7

Description of problem:
The symptoms begin when the machine boots fine, but attempting to start Gnome Terminal results in an error: "There was an error creating a child process for this terminal".

Rebooting then results in the graphical boot grinding to a halt, if you switch to the first console, you can see errors spewed all over the screen regarding inability to write to certain files in /var/ because its a readonly filesystem.

Booting in Knoppix and looking at the fstab produces one of two things (so far):

The first time this bug occurred, something had removed the line breaks in all but the last 3 lines (thats significant IMO, keep reading) of fstab, and replaced them with something that appeared as ^M in vim. I replaced these with proper linebreaks, rebooted, and everything was fine until today.  I believe the gnome-terminal error is caused by the fact that it couldn't see a /dev/pts mount line.

Today however, I got the same symptoms, including the reboot, and when I rebooted to Knoppix, my fstab had been reduced to the last 3 lines:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/sdb1               /media/usbdisk1         vfat    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/fd0                /media/floppy1          auto    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/hdc                /media/cdrom1           auto    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

These are the same three lines that were left undamaged the previous time this bug occurred. Rewriting /dev/pts and root filesystem lines and rebooting fixed the problem.

Between the first and second occurrence, I did do some (correct) editing of my fstab, and I did notice two copies of the:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details

line present. Maybe more than one copy is editing it and getting confused?

I believe this is also related to bug 161780: "Strange word in /etc/fstab '^M SpotFunctio'", at which you can see my 'me too' report.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
I do not currently know how to reproduce this on my machine, as the first time it happened I had done a "yum update", but I hadn't the second time.

Both times, I had edited /etc/fstab by hand (correctly), and done yum isntallations of other software, so I don't know which is causing it.
  

Actual Results:  When bug occurred, fstab corrupted.

Expected Results:  fstab not to be corrupted.

Additional info:

I feel that this may be relevant to bug 161780, as I also experienced this bug.