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Need to run fsck on the / partition and need help

Need to run fsck on the / partition and need help

Post by Brian E. Parke » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00



Hello,

At my previous job, I had a Redhat 6.2 box set up that handled a small
amount of mail, ran a few majordomo lists, and did some web serving.  This
weekend, the people there unpluged the box on accident and it won't boot
normally because of some errors on /dev/hda8, which just happens to be the /
partition.

From what they are tlling me over the phone, this is what is happening.
They turn the machine on, and it gets to LILO: then tries to boot the
kernal.  It runs the pre-check on /dev/hda8 ( I had him look at the
/etc/fstab to find out what partition that is, and it's the root / ) and has
a problem.  From what he says, it takes him to a point where he can type in
the root password and get to a command-line ( a "pwd" showed /root ) and
tells him he can run fsck manually or hit ^D to kill the shell.  I get him
to the command-line with the root password and we tried running fsck with
different parameters, but it doesn't seem to fix it because after a reboot,
it takes him right back to the password prompt after giving the same error
messages when trying to do the initial fsck on /dev/hda8.

What options should I run on fsck to get it to fix the root partition?  If
this isn't the correct way to approach this problem, what is?

None of the data on this machine is real critical, but it would be nice for
them to get it back up and running the way it was, because noone there has
the know-how to reinstall and get majordomo running.

Any help is appreciated.  I'm not on-site where the machine is, so if it
takes a couple days to get back to any questions you may have, it's because
I have to call them and talk them through anything you guys suggest.

TIA,
-BEP

 
 
 
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Need to run fsck on the / partition and need help

Post by E J » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00


lilo: linux single
bash# fsck /dev/hda8                   # select all the defaults when they show
up.

> Hello,

> At my previous job, I had a Redhat 6.2 box set up that handled a small
> amount of mail, ran a few majordomo lists, and did some web serving.  This
> weekend, the people there unpluged the box on accident and it won't boot
> normally because of some errors on /dev/hda8, which just happens to be the /
> partition.

> From what they are tlling me over the phone, this is what is happening.
> They turn the machine on, and it gets to LILO: then tries to boot the
> kernal.  It runs the pre-check on /dev/hda8 ( I had him look at the
> /etc/fstab to find out what partition that is, and it's the root / ) and has
> a problem.  From what he says, it takes him to a point where he can type in
> the root password and get to a command-line ( a "pwd" showed /root ) and
> tells him he can run fsck manually or hit ^D to kill the shell.  I get him
> to the command-line with the root password and we tried running fsck with
> different parameters, but it doesn't seem to fix it because after a reboot,
> it takes him right back to the password prompt after giving the same error
> messages when trying to do the initial fsck on /dev/hda8.

> What options should I run on fsck to get it to fix the root partition?  If
> this isn't the correct way to approach this problem, what is?

> None of the data on this machine is real critical, but it would be nice for
> them to get it back up and running the way it was, because noone there has
> the know-how to reinstall and get majordomo running.

> Any help is appreciated.  I'm not on-site where the machine is, so if it
> takes a couple days to get back to any questions you may have, it's because
> I have to call them and talk them through anything you guys suggest.

> TIA,
> -BEP


 
 
 
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Need to run fsck on the / partition and need help

Post by Leonard Even » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00



> Hello,

> At my previous job, I had a Redhat 6.2 box set up that handled a small
> amount of mail, ran a few majordomo lists, and did some web serving.  This
> weekend, the people there unpluged the box on accident and it won't boot
> normally because of some errors on /dev/hda8, which just happens to be the /
> partition.

> From what they are tlling me over the phone, this is what is happening.
> They turn the machine on, and it gets to LILO: then tries to boot the
> kernal.  It runs the pre-check on /dev/hda8 ( I had him look at the
> /etc/fstab to find out what partition that is, and it's the root / ) and has
> a problem.  From what he says, it takes him to a point where he can type in
> the root password and get to a command-line ( a "pwd" showed /root ) and
> tells him he can run fsck manually or hit ^D to kill the shell.  I get him
> to the command-line with the root password and we tried running fsck with
> different parameters, but it doesn't seem to fix it because after a reboot,
> it takes him right back to the password prompt after giving the same error
> messages when trying to do the initial fsck on /dev/hda8.

> What options should I run on fsck to get it to fix the root partition?  If
> this isn't the correct way to approach this problem, what is?

Normally, you should be able to run fsck manually, without even
adding any special parameters, and give the default answers to
all the prompts.  That almost always fixes the problem.  The last
two times I had to deal with a machine in which it didn't work, the
hard disk had been damaged.  You can try reinstalling Linux from
scratch, and if that doesn't work, you will probably have to replace
the hard disk.

Quote:

> None of the data on this machine is real critical, but it would be nice for
> them to get it back up and running the way it was, because noone there has
> the know-how to reinstall and get majordomo running.

> Any help is appreciated.  I'm not on-site where the machine is, so if it
> takes a couple days to get back to any questions you may have, it's because
> I have to call them and talk them through anything you guys suggest.

> TIA,
> -BEP

--


Dept. of Mathematics, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL 60208

 
 
 
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Need to run fsck on the / partition and need help

Post by Jim Broughto » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00



> Hello,

> At my previous job, I had a Redhat 6.2 box set up that handled a small
> amount of mail, ran a few majordomo lists, and did some web serving.  This
> weekend, the people there unpluged the box on accident and it won't boot
> normally because of some errors on /dev/hda8, which just happens to be the /
> partition.

> From what they are tlling me over the phone, this is what is happening.
> They turn the machine on, and it gets to LILO: then tries to boot the
> kernal.  It runs the pre-check on /dev/hda8 ( I had him look at the
> /etc/fstab to find out what partition that is, and it's the root / ) and has
> a problem.  From what he says, it takes him to a point where he can type in
> the root password and get to a command-line ( a "pwd" showed /root ) and
> tells him he can run fsck manually or hit ^D to kill the shell.  I get him
> to the command-line with the root password and we tried running fsck with
> different parameters, but it doesn't seem to fix it because after a reboot,
> it takes him right back to the password prompt after giving the same error
> messages when trying to do the initial fsck on /dev/hda8.

> What options should I run on fsck to get it to fix the root partition?  If
> this isn't the correct way to approach this problem, what is?

> None of the data on this machine is real critical, but it would be nice for
> them to get it back up and running the way it was, because noone there has
> the know-how to reinstall and get majordomo running.

> Any help is appreciated.  I'm not on-site where the machine is, so if it
> takes a couple days to get back to any questions you may have, it's because
> I have to call them and talk them through anything you guys suggest.

> TIA,
> -BEP

 You need to run fsck with NO parameters. Answer yes to all
questions reguarding the fixing of inodes and such. Running
fsck with no parameters puts it in interactive mode.
Here is a small snippet from the fsck man page.

NAME
       fsck - check and repair a Linux file system

SYNOPSIS
       fsck [ -sACVRTNP ] [ -t fstype ] [--] [ fsck-options ] filesys [ ... ]

DESCRIPTION
       fsck  is  used to check and optionally repair a one or more Linux file
systems.  filesys can
       be a device name (e.g.  /dev/hdc1, /dev/sdb2), a mount point (e.g.  /, /usr,
/home),  or  an
       ext2   label   or   UUID   specifier   (e.g.  
UUID=8868abf6-88c5-4a83-98b8-bfc24057f7bd  or
       LABEL=root).  The fsck program will try to run filesystems on different
physical disk drives
       in parallel to reduce total amount time to check all of the filesystems.

So run fsck like this

fsck -r /

will interactivly check the root partition.

--

Jim Broughton
(The Amiga OS! Now there was an OS)
If Sense were common everyone would have it!
Following Air and Water the third most abundant
thing on the planet is Human Stupidity.

 
 
 
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1. Need Help: fsck error on root partition, won't boot.

Hello again,

        I want to thank all those who responded to my post. I used the
distribution to create a "rescue" root disk, then did a boot using the
"bare.i" boot disk, use the rescue disk to e2fsck the effected disks. I found
that the lost+found subdirectories were full. I removed everything in those
directories and e2fsck-ed again.

        Anyway, all is well now.

Thanks again,

Lyndon F. Bartels

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