Howdy All,

using Fedora Core 4 on an old 'frankenstein' system I put together (Athlon XP, 512 Ram). no dual-booting, just one 40gb HD, which up until this morning was working fine. I can think of two things that might have screwed it up:

1. I altered the fstab file recently to try to get a usb flash drive to mount.

2. a severe lightning storm with power outages.

are either of these likely reasons for it not booting? (ok maybe that's an extremely 'newbie'-type question, but i'm willing to endure scorn for help )

I sat down at the computer this morning and started up firefox which refused to run. being a linux newbie and being well-accustomed to windows systems I restarted the machine (one secondary question I have is whether or not restarting is a good idea on linux in general?) and it hasn't rebooted since.

the error i'm seeing is:

Red Hat nash version 4.2.15 starting
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type
2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup))" now active
EXT3-fs: #blocks per group too big: 32769
mount: error 22 mounting ext3
Error opening /dev/console!!!!:2
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 0
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 1
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 2
switchroot: mount failed 22
Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

at which point it promptly hangs

tried booting off the first fedora install disk and running 'linux rescue' - but it can't seem to find the file system.

so how does one repair such a problem? don't mind reinstalling the OS if necessary, but would like to get my docs back first. And thank you in advance, oh Gods of Linux, for any help.

obmuc

To get your docs back you could try any one of the 'live' distros from someplace like distrowatch.com. These boot completely off of the cdrom, then you could try to access your linux partiton(s) to get your stuff. I'm no expert, by far, but from the looks of the boot messages I'd say you may need to re-install. Just don't take my word for it. Someone with more experience than me will probably disagree, and that's fine.

thanks for the reply Glenn,

yeah i'm trying the System Rescue CD Right now - which is a cool product. Tried to mount the old hard drive to get to my docs, but it's telling me the partition table is hosed. right now i'm running gpart - nice program; supposed to guess your partition table and rewrite it for you. taking a long time, will repost if it works. if anybody's got any other ideas i'd appreciate the help. thanks.

obmuc

well, gave up on restoring my data, reinstalled the OS and i'm back in business (minus my data). a more knowledgeable user might have been able to fix the prob - but time is an issue, so i'd rather have a working computer. Highly recommend the System Rescue CD - it got me a lot further than the tools that came with Fedora, and I was able to use the cfdisk program that comes on it to format a new HD for backup (fdisk wasn't able to). Lesson well learned - BACK UP YOUR DATA!