I'm running a small SuSe 8.1 box as a smaba server. While backing up to a USB HDD, I ran into a brief power failure.
the root fs is on /hda2, the backup drive is on /sda1 and is mounted on
/usr/backup. Both are reiserfs

When booting now, i get:

fsck failed. please repair manually and reboot.
the root fs is currently monted as read-only


if I run fsck manually, the root fs checks OK, but it refuses to read /sda1, with following error:
"could not open filesystem"

I suspect, the usb fs driver has not woken up or connected to the drive yet.

If I keep the USB drive off or disconnected I have exactly the same results.

What I would like to do is to mainly stop fsck from trying to check /sda1, so I can get the server back online. I can deal with the external HDD etc later.
Is there a config file where the fsck filesystems for boot are set?

fstab, by the way, as far as I can see is unchanged, the line for /sda1 is:

/dev/sda1 /usr/backup reiserfs defaults 1 2

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I had a similar problem when trying to get USB to work properly in Suse 9.1. (I still haven't solved the USB plug and unplug completely) The problem was I allowed Suse to choose /usr as my default mnt point. It caused an fsck failure on restart.

Eliminate all references to sda1 in your fstab and see if that works

cat /etc/fstab
mv /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bk
head -n 9 /etc/fstab.bk > /etc/fstab
(where 9 is the number of good lines before sda1 reference.)

Repair the root filesystem the first time; reboot, and when you come to the part about the system wanting to check your filesystem due to an unclean shutdown, just ignore the warning. It'll move on to the next step after 5 seconds. Once you are in, you can always unmount your sda1, and run fsck on that.

It worked.
Well sort of....
deleting /dev/sda1 from fstab solved the startup problem and I could boot the system again without any problems.
I started rummaging around a little to find out what has occured. Apparently /sda1 was set to be fsck-ed in fstab. Once this was removed, all was well.

Maybe I shold have read up on the fstab structure beforehand. Thanks a lot guys.