"fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot" on OpenSUSE 11.4 –gone after reboot?
 

First of all, I have to say that I'm a hopeless case. I've been using Linux ever since I had my own laptop (~5 years), yet I know next to nothing about it. Then again, I never had the heart to give it up either. When I bought a new laptop about a year ago and it came with Windows, I couldn't get used to it. And as I didn't know how to install Linux on Windows nor had anyone to help me with it, I just took out the hard drive of my old laptop and put it into the new one... :redface:

I've been using OpenSUSE for five years now (the hard drive might be even older, though), it got updated only once. Yet I didn't have any (major) problems so far, until two days ago, when it wouldn't start up normally, but instead gave me the following error message after booting:

fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root
file system is currently mounted read only. To remount it
read write do:

bash# mount -n -o remount,rw /

Attention: Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this
maintenance mode. shutdown or reboot will not work.

I had no idea what the problem was nor what to do to fix it. Rebooting the system didn't help either, so today I asked a friend for help (who himself isn't actually familiar with Linux). He told me to try -p or -f, which is what I did after switching to root. Susy didn't show any real reaction to it, she just complained that those commands are unknown to her. So I finally gave up.
But then, when I tried another reboot, Susy all of sudden started up normally again.

Now I'm puzzled. What could have been the problem, did I actually fix it and what should I do the next time it occurs?

And, as I guess I won't get around switching to a newer version of OpenSUSE, is there an uncomplicated way (YaST?) to use for the upgrade? :redface:

so you are aware that 11.4 went "End Of Life" back in November of 2012
Almost 2 years ago .

you can not use yast to skip 12.1,12.2,12.3
and go to 13.1

back up your data
and do a new clean install of 13.1

as for the error
it sounds like the hard drive is dieing

boot with the install cd in the drive
and select the rescue option from the menu options