Red Hat Linux not booting up
 

Hi,

I'm Nelson and a newbie on linux/unix operating system. I wasn't the one who installed linux so I have very little knowledge how it was set-up.

Our deskstop linux server doesn't boot up after I issued fsck -y. When I re-started it, it hangs with message "GRUB loading stage2".

I tried linux rescue to no avail. These were what I've done:

1. Boot using Red Hat Linux 6.2
2. Issued linux rescue
3. mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /foo
4. fsck -y
Messages:
Parallelizing fsck version 1.18 (11-Nov-1999)
WARNING: Couldn't open /etc/fstab : No such file or directory
5. Tried e2fsck -p /dev.hda1
Messages:
e2fsck: No such file or directory while trying to open/dev/hda1(null).
The superblock could not read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid, it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or sometihng else) then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
6. So I tried, e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda1
Messages:
e2fsck 1.18, 11-Nov-1999 for ext2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
e2fsck: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda1

I also tried fdisk -l but it did not display anything.

How can I repair linux to make it run again? Can I still recover databse and files from it?

Thank you.

It's possible that /dev/hda1 doesn't exist.

More likely, I suspect, is that when you ran 'fsck -l', you did so as normal user, which should not report anything if the directory containing the fsck executable is not in your user path. Su to root, then run 'fsck -l'.

Report the output here.

You are right, I su to root from a normal user. It happened so fast I wasn't able to take note of the output. Can it still be repaired or I just need to salvage the files?

Thank you very much.

What I did this morning was to fdisk -l /dev/hda1 but did not list anything. What does it mean?

Thanks

Hi,

Can anyone help me with this please?

Thanks

try running fdisk -l without /dev/hda1 and it should show how your drive is partitioned

Hi Kamby,

Thanks for your reply. I tried the fdisk -l but same thing, it didn't display anything. Do you think I can still recover my files?

Thanks again..