Let me kick this off with "i'm a newbie" ok now thats clear ..heres the problem.

I am running SME server v 6.0 on a 120GB HDD. Its been running well for about 5 months, I leave it running for periods of "weeks" without issues. Yesterday however we had a series of power failures, thankfully I have a UPS and managed to shutdown safely, however the power failures continues to plague the day. In the end my server failed to boot up.

During the typical system check on startup I recieved the following:

EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,3)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=xxxxx block=xxxxxx

the numbers (xxxxxxx) ascending as the error message would repeat for serveral minutes finally concluding with:

Couldn't find matching filesystem: LABEL=/

*** and 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 start up):

once i have type the root password i recieve:

(Repair file system) 1 #

At this point i have tried the following commands
fsck / -v-y
fsck /dev/hda1 -v-y
fsck /dev/hda2 -v-y
e2fsck -cc -C -f -v /dev/hda1
as adviced on other similar forum ...ultimately the results the same. I would recieve I recieve:

bash: fsck : No such file or directory
(Repair filesystem) 2 #

and so it goes on....what am i supposed to do, continue typing in commands....I have tried just typing y through to (Repair filesystem) 800 #

I need help.
(remember the first line..Im a newbie...so anyone kind enough to offer advice please keep instructions clear and basic)

.

I've been thinking about installing SME Server myself so I'm glad to hear that it run so well for that length of time.

I use Mandrake and it has a repair facility that you can stick in the CD at boot-up and repair various bits and pieces, I've done it to repair Lilo.
Does SME have something similar ?
Umm do you have backups of your critical data ? because this doesnt sound good.

floppy

What happens when you Control-D
My Smoothwall will occasionally do this and I just let it reboot and whatever the problem was gets fixed during the next file check
( now obviously your problem is more serious than mine )
after a serious power failure I had to let the system reboot 3 or 4 times, each time it fixed a different problem before it finally decided that it had righted itself
floppy

It sounds like you are on the right track BlueJuice with the fsck commands. The file systems on my SME 6.0 are:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 7.6G 916M 6.2G 13% /
/dev/hda1 99M 14M 80M 15% /boot
none 22M 0 22M 0% /dev/shm

I am not shure whether it uses ext2, ext3 or reiserf but using fsck with the right set of options should get you repaired and back in business.