When I installed Parrot OS (6.11.10) from a live USB it only used my internal solid state drive (SSD)(/dev/sdb). The second drive, a Western Digital (WD) 1T hard drive (/dev/sda), was not formated durring installation. I formatted and partitioned the WD drive using GPart in the GUI. I created three ext4 partitions 296GB in size with 1MB spaces between them. I was unable to write any data to the partitions on the WD drive and they had to be mounted manually. I was looking for solutions to that problem and a solution to modify the /etc/fstab file was presented.
P.S. The WD drive previously had an Arch Linux distro on it (Arch crashed after an update and I could not recover the system). I don’t know if that has anything to do with the problem, but thought it might be the reason the drive was not working to begin with.
To get the WD partitions to mount when the system booted and to assign the partitions to users I modified the /etc/fstab file. I used the UUID for each partition from the GPart information pane for each partition. Format used for each partition was, “[UUID] ext4 /home/[user] default 0 0”. On reboot the system (MSI motherboard, Cyberpower desktop, i7-8600 processor, disabled secure boot functions in bios) has two errors: Failed accounts-daemon.service and failed haveged.service. I rebooted and used the recovery option from the Parrot OS Grub menue. The system boots into a CLI prompt Parrot Security 6.2 despite what is selected in Grub.
Since I had CLI access I loged in to the admin account. I figured I would change the /etc/fstab file back to default since it worked before the changes. I tried sudo nano /etc/fstab. At the bottom of the nano file it said the file was read only. I used sudo su to become root because I thought it was a sudo permission problem. Tried to change the file again in nano, then Vim, then Plume (Parrot OS recommended text editor, seemed like nano). Then I used ls -l /etc/fstab. Permissions were “-wr-r–r– 1 root root 920 [date, time] /etc/fstab”. I was root@parrot # in the root directory /. I should have read write permissions already, but I used chmod -v +w /etc/fstab anyway. Verbose for chmod printed “chmod: changing permissions of ‘/etc/fstab’: Read-only file system failed to change mode of ‘/etc/fstab’ from 0644 (rw-r–r–) to 0644 (rw-r–r–)”. I thought the file must have an imutable attribute. I used lsattr -l /etc/fstab. It printed, “/etc/fstab —“. I took that to mean it didn’t have any attributes, but I ran the chattr -V -i /etc/fstab command. Verbose returned “Flags of /etc/fstab set as ——————– chattr: Read-only file system while setting flags on /etc/fstab”. I tried nano again anyway. Same result.
At this point I followed another suggestion to remount the file system in read write. Initially the mount -n -o remount,rw command was suggested. The command did not work. Using the man page I changed it to mount -a -o remount,rw /etc/fstab. That command failed. I used mount -a -o remount,rw. That took me to the sign in screen for Parrot OS. None of the passwords work for the accounts from there. Probably because the accounts-daemon.service failed at startup. Most of the premutations of mount -o remount,rw bring me to the same log in screen.
I am stuck there. Any help is appreciated.
