The Thursday 2004-02-26 at 15:57 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
....fscking the system and repairing the fs if necessary.....
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. So basically the program needed might not be accessible from the hdb
Carlos E. R. wrote: partitions. GREAT :( [snip]
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 with thfsck -VAa option.
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 Oops :)
OK, my new understanding so far ie: 1. Don't fsck a mounted partition 2. Boot from a CD/floppy to get cli access
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. I dunno, but it sure as hell is on the lilo menu if I boot from CD.
You need to boot the rescue system, from the CD or DVD, not from the HD. OK that's easy enough ie insert CD 1 and reboot...np.
Get to the bash command prompt there.... HOW?? When the machine reboots I am presented with a lilo graphical menu enabling me to either Boot from HDD, Installation, Installation with ACPI disabled, Install - Safe settings, Manual install, Rescue System, Memory Test. There is no option to go into a CLI mode???
....., and issue the fsck command plus options there. Something like "fsck /dev/hdb1". OK understood, but getting to the CLI from CD 1 seems to be the problem ie is there some special Susian key combination needed to access it or something...like Ctrl-Alt-Del :) Asides from that then how am I going to be able to issue a fsck command
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. surprise, surprise, the system still boots OK, into linux thankfully. hdc contained Win95 and was moved for testing purposes. It will never be reinstalled into the linux machine. I was wondering about commenting out
Choosing the Rescue System option the system starts asking me about my kb type. Right there and then I exited out of it as it looked too much like install, and asides you said to get into a CLI. like -VAa which will step through the fstab file if the fsck doesn't know where to find it? those entries of hdc or even deleting them.
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. KWrite will do it too thankfully when logged into another X session.
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. so I see....but there aren't half the options listed there that are listed on the fsck man page. I'll resort to my own written notes about this.
I wrote my notes about this on a handbook, but they are on another city right now. O:-) UPS delivers worldwide I hear :)
A little informed but still desperate to fsck (defrag?) the system. I am trying to leave the machine on as much as possible here and so far haven't been hit by a power outage....yet. When it does hit I am going to need to know howto use this fsck thing immediately. So the questions remain: 1. How to get to the CLI from the rescue option when booting off the CD? 2. How can I get fsck to walk through my fstab file if the / partition isn't mounted? 3. What fsck -option would be the best to check and repair the fs's and also give me verbose output and a progress bar Hylton -- The fscking desperate Little Helper ======================================================================== Hylton Conacher - Licenced ex-Windows user (apart from Quicken) Registered Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org Currently using SuSE 9.0 Professional with KDE 3.1 ========================================================================