Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 18662
Can't mound file systems - previous major/minor #'s now incorrect
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:29:05 EDT
I read the bug about not being able to mount floppys vfat (#18490). The suggested solution was to remove all vfat mounts from fstab. Did that, no luck. However, my problem is not confined to vfat. I cannot mount a floppy, no matter what file system, without the following error: mount: /dev/hd0 has wrong major or minor number. The major/minors for a floppy have always been 0/0 as far as I know, and worked just fine under 6.2. I upgrade to 7.0 and can no longer access my floppy (or windows partitions, but that's less critical). You posted a bugfix (anaconda-vfat-label-fix.img) that requires dd'ing an image to a floppy and booting with that. How the heck can I dd it to a floppy when I can't mount a floppy?!? Yes, I could do it on another working system, but that's not the point. What if I didn't have access to one? Here's the bizarre part- I do not have this problem on my "desktop" system. I upgraded to 7.0 and the same old fstab entry mounts floppys just fine. This problem only occurs on my IBM ThinkPad 600X. Had no problem under 6.2, but now I can't use a floppy with 7.0. I am going to try to make and use that fix img, and see what happens. But I would still consider this a "bug" regardless. Whether or not it has any priority, of course, depends on whether or not it's confined to ThinkPad 600X's or affects lots of people.
I can't reproduce this (but then I don't have a thinkpad). Is the thinkpad doing any oddities in floppy access (PCMCIA or USB floppy?)?
No, it's neither a USB or PCMCIA floppy, it's the OEM floppy connected to the floppy port. And no, it's not doing anything strange. It's always worked fine. I was able to format an ext2 floppy on my other machine and it mounted fine on the Thinkpad. So I saved my essential configuration files to floppy (which is why I needed it so) and then did a clean workstation install. The new install (with an identical fstab, I might add) works just fine. In fact I was very impressed that compared to installing 6.2 on the same laptop and all the hoop- jumping and workarounds that had to be done, this was a snap and everything works great (except the sound card - never could make that work). So the problem appears to be only a result of an upgrade from 6.2. I don't think this one's worth the time and effort to fix on the off chance that someone, somewhere, might also do a default upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0 on a Thinkpad 600X and have this problem. Unless you do...
I have the problem mounting windows partitions that this user alluded to. I get the same error about wrong major or minor number. I am using an AST desktop system with an AMD 586 processor running at 133 Mhz. The drives are set up like this hda - Windows drive with a linux swap partition hdb - CDRom drive hdc - Linux drive The swap partition works OK as far as I can tell.
I too am havin the same problem when I try to mount my cdrom on my HP Omnibook XE2 laptop - 'major or minor number incorrect'.
I figured out my problem. When I created a boot disk I had the write protect on so I was booting my 7.0 system with a 6.1 vmlinuz. I recreated the boot disk and then everything worked OK.
Judging by Jsusanj's response above, I think it may be due to the upgrade path - I noticed that I am booting with my old kernel, when I try a lilo -v I get a 'geo_comp_addr:Cylinder number is too big' (1108 > 1023) error.
Can't work with old kernels because of internal changes.