On 2010/11/07 12:22 (GMT+0200) Stan Goodman composed:
Felix Miata wrote:
I've never figured out how to manually do what couldn't be done automatically upon encountering this series of messages. I fix it by booting something else and doing fsck from that, and if that fails, reformatting and restoring from backup, or reinstalling fresh. Considering what has happened to your system over recent weeks, likely fresh installation of 11.3 will be the best course of action.
I've been thinking about that for some time, but I have done a great deal of configuration etc, and would resist losing it.
I could make a new partition to replace sda6, say sda8, and reinstall to it, specibying that the sda7 continue to be used for /home, and not be formatted. Or maybe easier, copy sda7 to a backup partition, reinstall in the existing partitions as they are, then recopy the backup over sda7.
You could, but I don't think that's necessary quite yet. Certainly sda7 can be used for /home without formatting. If you want to learn what's actually wrong with sda6 without stumbling through emergency boots to do it, by all means create sda8 to install to. I suggest if you do, disconnect the Hitachi to protect against the possibility of recurrence of whatever went wrong last time.
Question: If the problem is in GRUB, does it make sense to use David Rankin's GRUB Recovery Cheat Sheet, and make a new GRUB?
Assuming Grub were the problem, both yes and no. Followed exactly you'd lose IBM BM. The step setup (hd0) needs to instead be setup (hd0,5) in order to install Grub properly on sda6 instead of the MBR. Right now you seem to have an almost working Grub that reinstalling likely would not fix. Someone else needs to chime in here, because I don't know how the installer manipulates Grub to bypass the Grub menu (and access to a Grub prompt) on first boot after installation. If the bypass could be unset or ignored, you could reach a Grub prompt, from which you could chainload to sdb6 to perform further repair to sda6. The thing is, without a working Grub, you'd not be seeing what follows...
fsck is available from that prompt, but understanding how to get it to do manually what it couldn't figure out how to do automatically has always escaped me. Booting something else in order to fsck is what I always do from this point.
If this is something I should do, where is fsck and how can I get to it?
It's right there like I wrote. From the # repair shell prompt, type 'fsck /dev/sda6', but good luck actually getting it to fix anything. Unless you can get it fixed from the repair prompt, or boot some CD or DVD to run fsck successfully, I think you'll need to reinstall. I'm wondering if this corrupt filesystem message is due to corruption in the installer's 11.3 initrd rather than the filesystem itself, causing it to think it's operating on sda6 but instead seeing sdb6? I believe until you can make the Seagate boot 11.3, you may need to leave the Hitachi disconnected to protect its content.
Right, to generate a DFSee log with nothing in it other than the information it displays upon startup.
19-Exit DFSee
Nothing was recorded.
Are you sure? Did you hit ESC at startup instead of typing in DFSWORK2.TXT and hitting<enter>? Did you start DFSee from floppy or CD and have no writable space available to save the log?
I definitely made the DFSWORK2 directory on a USB stick.
I've yet to run DFSee while any type of USB device is connected, not even a mouse IIRC. I wonder if there are any bugs regarding disk ordering when DFSee is run from USB? It should be a DFSWORK2.TXT log file, not a directory.
What happened above was a Grub menu bypass that is normal on first boot following installation. If you were to try again, I would expect you would get a Grub menu or Grub prompt before a root repair # prompt.
I have fired up the system several times since, always with the same result.
So Grub on sda6 is actually working, just bypassing the menu because the final step of installation has yet to succeed, and boot can't succeed while the / filesystem on sda6 remains "corrupt".
23-Try to get a Grub prompt or menu 24-report back
At this point, I would settle for getting back to a GRUB prompt that I could boot from, like before.
As long as we can't figure out how to bypass the Grub menu bypass, or more importantly, get sda6 uncorrupted, I think you're stuck with needing to reinstall. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org