Tom Schaefer wrote:

This problem has bugged me since I've been using Linux and since it doesn't happen all the time, I can never remember the simplest recovery for this problem. I wind up booting up with boot diskettes and hacking shit till it works right, never being sure about what it was I did to fix it.

Currently, I have a user who is not real technical and she has to enter commands that I give her over the phone, several hundred miles away.

Scenario: Power outage caused the system to go down rudely.

Power up and the system comes up with the none@root:/ or something message. / is not mounted.

I have had the user run fsck, e2fsck in hopes that it would reset whatever flag it is that is causing that damn message to come up and not properly mount or start the system. I wish you guys had a simple doc somewhere for this, it's extremely frustrating because e2fsck and fsck don't really work according to the damn man pages.I've done the remount of root and then had her run fsck and e2fsck and that didn't fix anything either.

She has no rescue diskette, and even if she did, yast is too complicated for her to figure out.

Why don't you guys just setup the boot process to do it like SCO does, run the real fsck and make it really check the drive instead of the soft check.

What needs to be fixed so it will boot up properly?

Usualy the best thing is to start the system in single user mode, check the filesystems and reboot to your regular runlevel. This can be done by giving 'S' as parameter at the LILO promt: boot: <linux> S Where <linux> is the name of your LILO bootconfiguration (TAB shows you all possibilities). Then log on as root. At this point / will be mounted read only, and all the other partitions are still unmounted. Now go on and check every partition: e2fsck /dev/... You may want to give 'Y' as answer for every e2fsck question, usualy this is the best choice. Then log off and reboot as usual. If you are lucky the machine comes up without any problem. But you are realy in trouble if not... Ciao, BB -- Bodo Bauer S.u.S.E., LLC fon +1-510-835 7873 bb@suse.de 458 Santa Clara Avenue fax +1-510-835 7875 <A HREF="http://www.suse.com"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com</A">http://www.suse.com Oakland CA, 94610 USA -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e