I accidentally unmounted /home/ and now it wont start up.

[EazyTarQet]

I was trying to mount an external drive, and I accidentally unmounted the /home/ folder/drive, which I guess is the startup drive, and now my Steam Deck wont start up anymore. Is there any solution for this?

[EazyTarQet]

Originally posted by Bee:

Originally posted by EazyTarQet:

I don’t know these things, but I read something about that it needed a place to mount (whatever that means)

And this line in the error message, with the “none” after it doesn’t seem right?

Command: mount --verbose /dev/sdal none

The first rule of Linux: "Never press enter on a Konsole command if you don't exactly know what it will do."

We've all been here.

Well....I haven’t been in the konsol at all......just trying to mount a drive in KDE

[OGNocturnal]

Originally posted by EazyTarQet:

I don’t know these things, but I read something about that it needed a place to mount (whatever that means)

And this line in the error message, with the “none” after it doesn’t seem right?

Command: mount --verbose /dev/sdal none

I'm out of options with that error. But it does appear something more significant is going on that only the re-image can fix if what you are putting in is correct. I really think you should not of attempted this in the first place though.

As class101 says:

Originally posted by class101 deck:

I think you edited the file /etc/fstab wrongly, this file is dangerous to edit because it contains the persistent mounts so if you introduce an error inside, you are stuck to a Recovery
But on Steam Deck you don't have these boot tools so when you are playing with mount you do this with caution and you don't touch /home that is the only writable area of the Steam Deck, this is a system mount to not play with, your safer playground is in /home/deck/*, but not above this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing)
Sorry i can't be of more help.

[EazyTarQet]

Originally posted by ßr⊕†hεr ßεdﾚαm:

Originally posted by EazyTarQet:

I don’t know these things, but I read something about that it needed a place to mount (whatever that means)

And this line in the error message, with the “none” after it doesn’t seem right?

Command: mount --verbose /dev/sdal none

I'm out of options with that error. But it does appear something more significant is going on that only the re-image can fix if what you are putting in is correct. I really think you should not of attempted this in the first place though.

As class101 says:

Originally posted by class101 deck:

I think you edited the file /etc/fstab wrongly, this file is dangerous to edit because it contains the persistent mounts so if you introduce an error inside, you are stuck to a Recovery
But on Steam Deck you don't have these boot tools so when you are playing with mount you do this with caution and you don't touch /home that is the only writable area of the Steam Deck, this is a system mount to not play with, your safer playground is in /home/deck/*, but not above this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing)
Sorry i can't be of more help.

Attempted to connect an external drive? Why not? Should be the simplest of things. I just wanted to do a backup of my sd-card and some other important files. But yeah......of course thats nothing you should be able to do. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate you trying to help me, and thank you for that.

[PopinFRESH]

As WarnerCK noted previously, everything in Linux uses a single root name-space. This is different to how Windows/DOS traditionally handles disks and filesystems where each filesystem has its own name-space and separate tree (e.g. C: D: etc.)

Meaning that on Linux everything is within the same filesystem tree starting a the root "/" and in order to access the contents of a filesystem you need to tell the system to "fork" off to that filesystem at a specific directory (a.k.a a "mount point"). The mount point must be a directory that exists and your user must have access to it.

For example you could create a new directory in `/home/deck/external` which is within your users home directory. Then you should be able to mount the filesystem to that path. If you mount it to /home/ then you are "covering up" the existing data that is within the directory /home/ which is where the home directories for all the users on the system exist, and thus the "deck" users home directory will no longer be accessible because you've put a different filesystem above it within the hierarchy. This is partially why it broke things because when you rebooted the deck user no longer had an accessible home directory. Tried to illustrate this below

/home/deck/

      /external_drive_filesystem
/home/deck

whereas if you create a new directory within your users home directory called something like "external" in the example above then you'd mount it to the path like this

                    /extneral_drive_filesystem
/home/deck/external/..

If you are just wanting to temporarily mount it to backup files from your microSD card then there should already be an empty directory called /mnt/ which you should be able to safely mount the filesystem to.

You will also want to use an ext4 filesystem.