From Bugzilla Helper: 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.
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
Have been unable to reproduce since on FC4, not currently upgrading original box. Will reopen if I can repro on recent version at a later date.