I’m a Qubes noob and made a mistake in the /etc/fstab file in the debian-11-template vm. In the worst-case situation I can re-install the whole thing and just start over, but I thought I would use this as a learning experience with some of the dark corners of the system.
I made changes to /etc/fstab to add some removable USB drives I have and rebooted my system. Unfortunately my changes prevent VMs using it from starting, including sys-net, sys-fiirewall, and others. This prevents me from updating the template using the normal methods.
I tried to mount the logical volume to /mnt, but the mount program indicated it could not mount it due to wrong fs type, bad block, etc. Not sure if I’m missing a magical incantation in the form of a mount argument or something else.
My question is whether there is a way to mount the logical volume so I can edit the fiile, or should I just start over?
I got to step 2, but the qvm-run command fails because it automatically starts sys-net and sys-firewall and both of these depend on the corrupted template. The error message mentions “Cannot connect to qrexec agent for 60 seconds…”
I tried this command using the --service=qubes.StartApp+xterm and using --no-gui /bin/bash to get a command line, but both result in the same result with failure to start the sys-net and sys-firewall VMs.
I ended up changiing the templates for sys-net to fedora-36. I then created a throwaway, not disposable, qube using sys-net for networking and fired it up. I used the how to mount LVM volumes howto and was able to resolve my issue. After insuring the debian-11 based VMs ran, I deleted the throwaway VM and restored sys-net to debian-11.