boot failure, root filesystem check hangs forever
 

Hi,

I am using centos 4.2, ext3 partition and lvm2 on my pc. Recently, I tried to use lvm snapshot volume to back up my root partition. But suddenly, the system hung on creating snapshot volume. (my machine always hang from time to time for unknown reason and i suspect that was a hardware problem). Then I booted into rescue mode and removed the snapshot volume, fsck the root partition with options -p -f -c and the report says no bad blocks. Still I cannot boot up the system normally. What else can I do to recover the system without restoring backup?

I only have backups of root partition made with taring the lvm snapshot volume of root partition before, I am not sure if this is enough to recover the system in this situation. If backup restoration is required, all I need to do is to only boot in rescue mode and extract the tarball to replace everything? I haven't tried that before.

Also, the thing that bothers me most is that everytime the system boots after unclean shutdown (system previously hung for unknown reason), it will prompt for file system integrity check for 5 seconds. If i press Y, then the system seems to be checking the disk for few minutes (the disk led is flashing), then the display will display entirely and the led is not flashing!!!! if I don't press anything or press N, the display will disappear immediately. How comes??? In previous boot failures after unclean shutdown, I can still recover the system with fsck in rescue mode, but this time system hung on creating snapshot volume, the trick doesn't work.

Please help.

Thanks,
VOA