Fix fstab to prevent boot failure

Question

How can I fix fstab to prevent boot failure? It seems that I have added incorrect record to /etc/fstab:

//servername/share    /mnt/share    cifs     defaults,username=myuser     0 0

When I did mount -a, it asked user password to mount network share. It seems that it cannot proceed without password on boot, so it is just hung.

BTW, I have RHEL6 VM instance running under Hyper-V. Is there any way to change fstab file using Hyper-V manager functionality/features? I know about snapshots and, actually, I have made snapshot before. But the problem is that it was made long time ago, I will lose all my changes performed recently on rollback.

Answer 1

How about removing the entry, creating a snapshot and then trying to change your /etc/fstab so you have a working snapshot you can roll back to?

According to the manpage mount.cifs you can also specify a password via password=arg. Also, according to that manpage there is no argument username=arg but instead user=arg. But it might be different on your system, better check your manpage for the correct argument names.

Answer 2

It seems that I've found a solution:

• at the grub prompt, hit a to append options
• add init=/bin/bash to the kernel command line
• mount -o remount,rw /
• vim /etc/fstab
• reboot