Bad line of code in fstab is there a way to safe boot to remove it?

Was trying to mount a second drive using fstab but got tired and took a break, and shut down by mistake now I can not boot. Is there a safe boot where i can edit out the line. or do I have to reinstall the os?

You could try to boot from Zorin boot stick in "Try Zorin" mode and then run the program "Boot repair" or try to edit the fstab file on your drive in live session. But I'm not sure if it works.

Do you recall what exact changes you have made in fstab?

Check if you can get to root shell from grub menu.
Grub menu -> Advance Options -> Recovery Mode -> Root shell

Then remount the / with rw permissions:

mount -o remount,rw /

Open the fstab with nano text editor:

nano /etc/fstab

Discard the changes that you have made earlier and verify the mount points of / and /boot/efi

Save the changes and reboot.

1 Like

Hi all Happy New year, thanks for your kind responses. I tried the above and managed to delete the line of code, but was unsuccessful, at a permanent fix. This is what I did instead, downloaded Zorin 18 and put it on another drive.
so far so good, as this was a new build I did not have a lot of data to loose. I have 2 nv 3 1tb drives and a 1 tb sata drive. the Z18 is on the sata drive and 17 is still on one of the nmv's. This what I see on gparted for that drive.

Partition Name File sys size used unused flags
/dev/nvme1n1p1 efi sys partition fat 32 512MIB --- --- boot, esp
/dev/nvme1n1p2 ext4 44.89 GIB 886,12 GIB
On the first line after the nvme1n1p2 is an orange triangle with exclamation point.

So my follow up question is, is there a way to to move the 44.89 GIB of files from this drive to another without mounting it. Any suggestions gladly accepted, keeping in mind that I only know enough to get myself in trouble. Can you point out some resources that I can read, I did learn basic and some DOS in the early days .

I found this by asking the brave AI----Auto Mount Drive Zorin 18

To automatically mount a drive in Zorin OS 18, you can use the built-in Disks application. Open the Disks app from the system menu, select the drive or partition you want to mount, and click the "More Settings" icon (three vertical dots) below the drive listing From the menu, select "Edit Mount Options" In the window that appears, ensure that "User Session Defaults" is turned off, then check both "Mount at system startup" and "Show in user interface" Click "OK" to save the settings This configuration will ensure the drive is mounted automatically at boot and appears in the file manager

Please Note: I found that “Edit Mount Options” was not available in the three dots menu on my version of Disks, but was available by clicking the gear wheel under the representation of the partition. Apart from that I followed the instructions above and it worked. It uses the UUID to identify the drive so I think the mount is just as robust as the process described below. You have to reboot to have the changes take affect. It shows up in “Files” under other. I had previously formatted this drive with ext4 and labelled it as b-storage. That designation was also displayed.

Alternatively, you can manually configure the /etc/fstab file for more control. First, identify the drive's UUID and filesystem type using the lsblk -f command Then, create a mount point directory (e.g., sudo mkdir -p /media/yourdrive) and set appropriate ownership with sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/yourdrive Edit the /etc/fstab file using sudo nano /etc/fstab and add a line in the format: UUID=your-uuid-here /media/yourdrive filesystem-type defaults 0 0 Replace your-uuid-here with the actual UUID, and filesystem-type with the correct type (e.g., ext4, ntfs, or exfat) Save and exit the file. Reboot to test the configuration.

For network shares like SMB, install cifs-utils with sudo apt install cifs-utils, then add an entry to /etc/fstab using the share path, mount point, and appropriate options such as username and password Ensure the share path uses backslashes for spaces (e.g., Shared\\040Media)

So one issue solved.