When I boot up Fedora 5, which is part of a multiboot, I get the following error message:

INIT: Entering Runlevel: 5quotas: write mode: FAILED

I believe this is two lines run together, telling me that it's entering runlevel 5, and then without taking breath it's telling me that quotas write mode has failed - whatever that means. Unless someone has a better explanation.

I don't know whether this is relevant but this started after I installed SUSE to another partition which wrote null labels to the Fedora partition and the shared swap partition. (I did something wrong in the SUSE custom partition install - that's not important now.) The labels for Fedora (in this setup) should be '/1' for the root partition and 'SWAP-sda5' for swap. When I first booted into Fedora after I had installed SUSE, I got a kernel panic. At first I tried editing fstab so that the root partition line pointed to /dev/sda6 rather than /1, but then sussed what really needed to be done and relabelled the two partitions with e2label and mkswap. And restored fstab to its original form. Fedora now boots up OK, and seems to work OK, except for the error message.

Has anyone any idea what this means, what problems it might be causing and how to fix it? Does it matter? I'm loathe to fiddle about blindly, but a red 'failed' notification unnerves me.

How about reinitialising the quota files?

I appreciate your post - thanks; I've had a long day out so I've only just discovered it. I had almost given up on anyone responding.

I know next to nothing about quotas, having neither come across the concept before this problem, nor (being the sole user of my systems) having any use for them. My googling before I started this thread was not particularly enlightening, but I shall google again - tomorrow, when I am fresh. In the meantime, I don't know how to reinitialise quota files and a nudge in the right direction would be welcome.

And a question: Are quotas set in the default Fedora installation? I never asked for them.

I've had a long day out so I've only just discovered it.
You know you can subscribe to threads? No need to watch, you'll get an email when replies arrive.


I don't know how to reinitialise quota files and a nudge in the right direction would be welcome.
Try running "quotacheck -bfvmi" (first run "man quotacheck" to understand what the flags mean).


[i]Are quotas set in the default Fedora installation?[i]
I thought it was an O.S. install option near the partitioning and formatting stuff?


I never asked for them.
And even so you did get them for free! Ain't life grand ;-p

unSpawn, my apologies for not responding earlier, but I've only just discovered the solution - and it's incredibly simple. And perhaps it's nothing to do with quotas - I really don't know.

Anyway, fiddling around with quotacheck got me nowhere unfortunately. It just made my head hurt. Then I rather gave up because I had by then set up a quad boot (Fedora 5, SuSE 10.1, Ubuntu Dapper and Windows) on my laptop so if I wanted to use Fedora I tended to favour the laptop. I've booted into Fedora on the laptop goodness knows how many times without problem but then, this morning, the same thing happened. "INIT: Entering Runlevel: 5quotas: write mode: FAILED" All I had done was to edit my Fedora /etc/fstab from Ubuntu, putting in a line to mount a shared vfat partition. Ho hum. Detective work time. As far as I could tell the partition label on the shared swap partition had disappeared. I tried what I had tried before with mkswap, to no avail. So I changed:

in the fedora fstab to:

and the problem melted away. I did the same with the corresponding line in the desktop and problem gone there now too. Or at least if there is a problem, it's not telling me. I can explain the disappearing swap partition label in the desktop, but not in the laptop. And why a muddle over swap partition labels should cause that error message is quite beyond me.

Another curiosity. I installed fedora on a second desktop, but in that it did not label the swap partition, being happy with /dev/hda5 or whatever. I wish fedora would make its mind up.