Thanks Mara;

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"You should unmount the filesystem and then run the command again."
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I did and got the very same thing:

"/:clean, 302466/770048 files, 1515638/1538223 blocks"

Bill

Your system, with some luck, should boot normally now. Can you try?

To Mara;

runlevel 1 and runlevel 3 work fine - everything seems to be there and I can run programs from the command line. However, runlevel 5 still chokes, as does 'startx'.

tail /var/log/XFree86.0.log --> "XIO:fatal IO error 104
(connection reset by peer on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining"
- then goes on to tell how to submit a bug report in Bugzilla

I think there is two problems mixed. 1. the result of moving and resizing my partition (as you point out, it , in fact, may not be a problem; and, 2. my crashed installation of OpenOffice. I would just wipe everything new in OpenOffice and start reinstalling except that '(parted) check' [for /dev/hda3] still says "partition is 15994.402 MB but file system is 6008.684 MB". In other words the partition size is the correct new expanded size while the file system size is the old '100% full ' size.

Is this alright or is there a conflict?

Bill

I made a mess of my disk as well a while ago .... windows fdisk screwed up my partition table ..... managed to recover one important reiser partition with testdisk .....http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.html .... great tool !

Da Wini G.

I start to think that reinstall (after moving all your data) may be a good idea. But I'd recommend you to format hda3. During format if should 'catch' the full partition size.
For sure there are things broken...There's something with X, probably also with other things. So that's one of the rare cases I'd say the easiest solution will be to reinstall.

Thanks Mara;

I am going to reinstall. After all, I have been playing around with this for two weeks. If you could give me one more suggestion.

I would like to save as much as I can to disk and copy it back after the re-installation. My problem is: My file system is full so I can't create a archive (backup) directory and I am not sure how to directly save to CD from the command line. At this point I would be happy just to copy and skip tar and zip if necessary. Any suggestions?

I probably have only one shot at this so I don't want to risk everything by experimenting.

Bill

Something likeEdit:
Explanation: It burns directory/ to the CD.

Mara;

I am ready to burn. I have spent the day reading (and trying to learn) about mkisofs and cdrecord.

The HOWTO's and google articles seem to say that I will have to divide my "/" system into 620 MB chunks before I save (that's ok) but 'man cdrecord' seems silent (or I missed the part about size) and your advice, which I am inclined to follow, implies that I start the save and feed the disks on demand. ie cdrecord will do the save as one job, pausing to ask for additional disks as required. Am I accurate?

If it makes a difference, I have cdrecord v2.0.

Bill

No, it won't pause. You need to make sure that the directory you're burning is less than ~650MB (or ~700MB, depending on the CD-R/RW you're using). There will be no size check. I recommend to read the file that was written last after the cd is burned.

The method I gave you only 'misses' the createing on image file. When there's no image, cdrecord has no possibility to check if the file with fit the cd. So the method may result in broken cds if you're not careful enough.

How I Did It.

First, I backed-up my active files, by burning directly to a CD. Using 'parted' on my rescue disk, making sure that my '/' was unmounted (umount), I shrunk '/' to its original size ('parted resize'); then, expanded it into the unallocated space ('parted resize'). Once it was properly re-expanded everything worked. I finished off by updating using red carpet. Now my Linux system is better than new.


If You Are Interested -- Below are lessons re-re-re-learned.
These lessons apply to Linux, Computers and Life.

A) Keep It Simple, ...
Calm down, think, start with the basic basics.
1. Frustration, anger, bashing ahead (in either sense) never works with inanimate objects (and seldom works with animate ones).
2. Its easier to fix the first mistake than a combination of three or four subsequent mistakes.
3. Programs (and other things) are seldom designed without taking the possibility of human error into account. It usually takes a very creative idiot to bypass most safeguards. If something goes wrong it is usually your fault not the programmer's. It is possible, of course, that the error is integral to the program, but entertain that thought as a last remote possibility.
3a. Most human errors have built in fixes -- usually simple, like just starting over.
4. Combined with frustration, it's the things that you really know how to do that are the most dangerous. Most of my mistakes occur because I'm not watching my own actions, but pounding away with keystrokes that I am intuitively certain are correct and thus repeating some very basic error over and over again.

B) ... Stupid
Rather than list all of mankind's stupid mistakes and errors, I'll tell you how I got into this particular mess.
1. When I went to build the new snapshot version of Open Office, I failed to read the readme which clearly stated I would need an additional 6 gigs of hard disk space to do the build.
2. When I got the "disk 100% full" message, I immediately remembered that I had unallocated space on my hard drive, called my computer stupid and jumped to 'parted'.
3. When that apparently didn't work, I used my rescue disk to diagnose the problem. In my frustration, I failed to make sure that the root '/' was unmounted each and every time I tried something -- so I kept getting different answers.
4. When I asked for help here, I didn't say to myself that it was impossible to have differing responses from the same diagnostic program.
5. Luckily I had to leave Linux for a couple of weeks to do other things. When I came back to my problem I was cooled down and cautious.

Voila!

KISS to all who helped