Help! I am unable to boot into my Slackware 10.1 system
 

Hi,
My system running Slackware 10.1 was working fine till today morning. But now when I try to boot into it, it refuses to boot and stops at checking the root file system. The checking stops at 78% and here is what is displayed on the monitor -


Now when I give root password, it automatically reboots back to grub.
I do not know how to come out of this mess. Kindly help
Thanking in advance,

In order to fix the filesystem on hda5, you will need to get out of multi-user mode. You have two options as far as I can see,adityavpratap.

(1) Boot the computer. You say you have grub installed. If that starts Slackware directly, you'll have to press 'e' to enter grub's edit mode and change Slackware's kernel line: you have to add "single" there (without the double quotes of course) so that you start Slackware in "single" user mode.
If you have lilo, then you need to press <TAB> at the LILO boot screen so that you have the time to type "linux single" - assuming here that the word "linux" is the name of the LILO label that starts your Slackware.

Once you get to the command prompt, you can run either so that any inconsistencies are automatically repaired, or where you have to press 'y' or 'n' for every inconsistency that needs to be resolved. When that finishes, you can reboot the computer and all should be fine.

(2) If you can not get as far as to the command prompt using method (1), you will need a bootable Linux CD. That can be a Knoppix CD, or Slackware's install CD. Boot from the CD, get to a command prompt, and run or . That should fix it.

Eric

Thanks for the prompt reply.
I have grub. so I tried to add single at the end of the kernel line.
However I got stuck at the same point. When I entered the root password when asked for, to enter the single user mode, the system simple rebooted.
However I got the general idea behind your suggestion. So I I fired up PCLinuxOS (that is already installed on my system alongwith Slack and WinXP) and added /dev/hda5 (root of Slack) to the fstab.
I rebooted.
During the boot up of PCLinuxOS the /dev/hda5 was again checked and got the same error message and was prompted for root password. Upon entering the root password I was dropped to the single user mode. I gave fsck /dev/hda5. Now all the errors were set right this time.

But the question remains, why was my root password not being accepted when I tried to boot through Slackware?

you should really use the 2nd idea suggested by Alien Bob. By booting using Knoppix or other LiveCD, you could do the checking without mounting the partition,which is more preferable.

Ok. But right now I don't have a knoppix CD available and my Slackware install CD is corrupted.
Right now I am in PCLinuxOS. However /dev/hda5 is mounted in /mnt/hda5 through fstab. Can I comment out the entry for /dev/hda5 in fstab, reboot into PCLOS and run fsck /dev/hda5 from the command prompt
Or can I simply umount /dev/hda5 and do fsck /dev/hda5 (/dev/hda5 being the root dir for Slackware and not PCLinuxOS)?

just umounting then fscking would be easiest.

Thanks! :-)

And afterwards maybe it would be a better idea to convert to a journaling filesystem like ext3 or Reiserfs.

Hey but it is ext3!

That's not supposed to happen! What did you do?

Now when I think of it, it happened after an unclean shutdown. My KDE had died and I was unable to log out of it. So I pressed ctrl+alt+F6 and gave shutdown -h now as root.
The problem mentioned occured when I tried to boot in after this.

I think this one and the problem I have recounted here - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=438198 are inter-related.

Maybe consider trying Reiserfs. I also run something similar to ext2 on my *BSD system, and I had to shut down hard once. It was a terrible feeling but it seems to have recovered pretty well. Reiserfs seems more tolerant of problems and replays the journal to recover any lost updates.

Can I convert the filesystem to Rieserfs from ext3 now, without corrupting the data