Gidday

On a Sun Ultra10 333MHz, 512M, 9gB HDD. Booting Fedora-9. Silo v1.4.14 into kernel 2.6.27 64bit (vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-78.2.9fc9.sparc64). This is a brand-new installation. Although it's running on a Sparc it makes v.litte difference so far as this bootprocess, teh way Linux runs, where everything is - is concerned. That's why I've cross posted this query here.

Booting merrily, in the interactive startup section just past "Starting udev", "Setting hostname", at "Checking filesystems" I get:

/: clean, 155284/557056 files, 920932/2225412 blocks
fsck.ext2: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program? [FAILED]

*** An error occured during the filesystem check
*** Dropping you to a shell, the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell
*** Warning --SELinux is active
*** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
*** Run 'setenforce 1" to reenable
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

I found the file rc.sysinit contains the instruction for this part of the boot process, however, just commenting out the offending lines may get the system to boot but it does not fix the underlying problem.

I have fsck'd the disk and it's fine.

Just what the underlying problem is has me flummoxed. You might know what it is, if so I'd be appropriately grateful if you would share the fix with me.

Regards
Peter

Not a lot to go on. What's going on there is that the system is mounting each disk in /etc/fstab and running e2fsck. Normally, that will quit immediately unless the disk was poorly shut down (crash, etc). But I would focus on
fsck.ext2: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda

It looks like a typo in fstab, because /dev/sda is the whole disk, and you should not be running fsck on that. You run fsck on a partition (/dev/sda2 or the like).