/etc/mtab Boot Nightmare
The other day, I was working on my senior design project (a kernel project), and I did the good ol’ make/make install/reboot to see my changes. Coming back, expecting my computer to have booted, I found it hung at:
Cannot create link /etc/mtab
perhaps there is a stale lockfile?
Naturally thinking it was my project’s fault (it was), I rebooted into my normal kernel. To my horror, the same error came up. After a period of mini-panic, I ran to Google and at the same time reached for my Gentoo CD (the newest I could find was 2007.0 minimal, but it still works!). I ran e2fsck on both my home and root partitions for good measure, and then mounted my root partition and looked at /etc/mtab*. Apparently, the fact that there was mtab, mtab~, mtab~2205 and mtab~2213 isn’t normal. On recommendation from this obscure post from three years ago, I deleted the extra files (after examining them and noting they were not only extraneous but empty), rebooted, and viola! Problem solved!
Turns out a number of different things I did caused this error several different times. Not exactly sure why, but it always seems to coincide with the boot of or boot after a kernel oops or panic.
External Links
I had this issue too – luckily this is a simple, quick fix.