serious boot/mount problem
 

Hi out there,
i´m in trouble. my box doesn´t work anymore. first it didn´t shutdown correctly then the booting was a desaster:
when it comes to /etc/init.d/boot calling
mount proc ... ->command mount not known
so it doesn´t mount anything-> no process files, no directories, nothing. everything read-only! i can browse the files with joe but can´t write.
i checked /boot directory that i have on hda1
ls -a /boot and in there should be a couple programs like boot.b
chain.b and so on but all i get displayed is: . ..
but i don´t know whether the directory is empty or the content´s not visible.

i have no clue how to get that fixed. not even how i could make any changes to my conf files or so. nothing. seems it´s not much help either to run rescue system from suse or boot from cd. what is it good for?
any help really much appreciated! thanks a lot!
jens

. .. and nothing else means empy. I don't know what to tell you more, backups???

Linux is still not an end user system *not that you're necessarily an end-user j-ray*, but these things shouldn't really happen with any OS I'm afraid.

I've done this once - not for this reason though. It sux bigtime. First you feel shocked then sickened then angry then helpless.

Could journalled fs not have helped here? Isn't the point of ext3fs to stop these sorts of crashes .. ?

These things are set to test us j-ray. It sounds like you've lost your OS. If you can get a command line you can get your most essential files ? Can you mount other partitions (if you have any?)

Maybe something happened to your /etc/fstab file. If you have a separate /boot partition, it could be that it didn't get mounted and that could be why your command ls -a /boot displays only ' . .. '.

check if you can still mount other medias, and try to copy your important files. It does sound like a nasty crash...one of those where the only answer is "reinstall". Did you format your partition as ext2 or as ext3?
And this problem occurred after you shutted down several times the dirty way right??
Let us know what's going on.

thanks for your replies!
i ran fsck from the rescue system and it checked
hda1 is ok but hda3 has a corrupt super-block and cannot be repaired by sth like
e2fsck -p /dev/hda3
or any other option it offers.(on hda3 there is root directory and everything else) i cannot put the data on another partition cause hda3 covers almost entire hd.

i guess i´ll have a bottle of wine later and reinstall everything tomorrow.

i promise not to shutdown 'dirty way' in near future :)

any better solutions still welcome!
cheers, jens

I don't know how much this will help. But I have some doubts. First of all if you don't have any files in /boot how did it boot the kernel?. Anyway try specifying another superblock while running e2fsck. Something like e2fsck -b 8193. See man e2fsck for more details. I think it won't be bad idea to try this before reinstall.
--Sarin.

i already tried that,sarin. it gives out
bad magic number - this is not a valid ext2 file
or something like that. so the program can neither enter not repair or exchange anything in there.

cheers, jens

it´s a nice day for a white wedding
billy idol