Hi! I'm a newbie. After using my Redhat 7.2 with KDE on it..something happened, a program got hanged up. Keyboards don't respond and even the mouse. So what I did was to push the reset button on my PC. After that, it displayed something like this:

=================================================
Checking root filesystem
/contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/:
Inode 573953 has imagic flag set.
/:UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)

[FAILED]

*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):
================================================

I have a book here on Linux Unleashed and I searched on the "fsck" command but don't have examples on how to troubleshoot the file system especially if not properly shut down.

Secondly, which is best? Push the reset button or press Ctrl+Alt+Del?

Waiting for your favorable answers on my problems. Thanks.

EDERTS

Not much point pushing Ctrl+Alt+Del when the keyboard is not responding...

Thanks....but what about my problem on my filesystem? Since it was not shut down properly, I was asked to run "fsck" manually. Do you have any sites where I can get some info about troubleshooting with a problem like this?

Already visited www.redhat.com but to no avail.

EDERTS

My advice would be to reinstall 7.2 and use the ext3 file system and you'll never see this error again.

ro tun fsck manually, log in as root when it tells you to, and run

fsck /dev/hda5

assuming that hda5 is the location of /

don';t just give up and reinstall, where's the fun in that??

In my case, reinstalling was not to consider...
I had the same problem and i did the fsck for all partition and it worked out fine. Some partition didn't want to do it but it tells me so and i pass to an other. However, i accept everything that it suggest without knowing what i was doing and it seems to reboot fine so far, but i would like to know what those inode does and what could be the result of replying y to deleting some of them. Is there some application that will fail now?

AFAIK an inode is the linux equivelent of a cluster on a fat* file system...but I could be wrong.

it's possible, but it's not likely. an inode is a pointer (of sorts) to a block on the hard disk. generally, when the system crashes and needs to be fsck'ed, then it's data files and /tmp files that are going to be lost. it's possible that a binary could be damaged, but that would only really happen if it was being loaded during the crash. try running the same prog that you were running during the crash. if it works, you're pretty much in the clear.