The Thursday 2004-02-26 at 15:57 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
When it wanted to fsck it was asking me for the root password. entering it and pressing enter brought up that the system could not find locale. ??
Mmm. If the problem is in the root partition, it may have problems reading some files. Also, considering your fstab: /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdb9 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb10 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb6 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb7 /var ext3 defaults 1 2 At that point, only "/" is mounted, not "/usr" nor "/var" - it may need something in there. It is not the first time they put something in /usr that is needed during the manual fsck part.
I tried the rescue to no avail and even entered the command fsck -VAa / into the additional options with NO luck.
Not "/", but /dev/hdaX, where X is the number of the partition you have to check, and hda might be hdb, or whatever. You must know that yourself. In my case with all the partition in the fstasb file I figured it would just be better to walk through that and fsck the lot.
Eummmm.... I have an idea, read on.
Hold on a moment... Additional options? It is a command to be entered at a command line prompt. Where are you typing it? When LiLo rears its bootloader it has a few options namely Boot from local harddisk, boot safely, rescue mode and a couple of others. Just below it is a space to enter cli commands. That is where I added the additional options.
Gosh! No wonder it doesn't work! Commands have to be entered at a command prompt Ok, I don't have SuSE 9.0, only 8.2, but I can guess what that rescue entry is. Not good enough in this case. You need to boot the rescue system, from the CD or DVD, not from the HD. Get to the bash command prompt there, and issue the fsck command plus options there. Something like "fsck /dev/hdb1". Now my second idea, your fstab, which I saw on another post. There you have entries for hdb and hdc - but you mention that hdc was later removed. If there are entries for hdc (hdc1, for example, a windows mount), but no hdc disk on the system, it will not boot! And it will precisely tell you to fsck manually. So, you have to manually mount that disk from inside the rescue CD, edit the fstab (with vi, I don't think there is anything else there), and comment out those lines.
How the hell do I get my system back by completing the fsck!!
Well...
The man pages of e2fsck and resiserfsck are printed at the end of the SuSE admin book just for these ocassions.
Bloody hell, why did they have to call it another name!
e2fsck vs fsck? Well, fsck just calls e2fsck or others as appropriate.
Why not just call it fsck related man pages. I'll have a look but I doubt it is going to show me anything that I haven't already seen in the special edition if Using Linux or my Linux+ certification book.
:-) I read "the handbook" from first to last page time ago, on another version (smaller), and I knew those man pages were printed there, because you need them precisely when you can not read man pages on the broken computer.
Desperate Hylton
I understand those feelings. There is always a first time; the next will be easier. ALOT EASIER. I am never going to forget how to run FSCK on a system again, I think.
I wrote my notes about this on a handbook, but they are on another city right now. O:-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson