Hi,

Well my poor computer won't startup now. What happens during the startup is it says

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/


It prompts me to login as root, which I do, and the shell is called "none" instead of "bash". I try the above command, but then it just doesn't work and gives me usage info for "mount". But I can't figure out what I'm supposed to type to get it into read-write mode again. Can someone help please?

I think that my hard drive is /dev/hda2 (?)

Thank you

It's always dangerous to run a fils system check/repair (fsck) on a mounted filesystem. The problem here is you can't unmount the root (/) filesystem...

So the best way to repair your / file system, is to boot from the SuSE CD/DVD and then choose "rescue system" (at least this worked back in the SuSE 7.3 days). It will not touch your hard drive but boots into a small system with shell, all directly from the CD.

The advantage is that now the root (/) file system on the hard drive isn't even mounted ('cos the system booted from CD) so you can safely do "fsck /dev/hda2" or wherever your / resides. If you're not sure you can mount it on /mnt, using "mount /dev/hda2 /mnt" then see inside /mnt if it is the right partition, then "umount /mnt" and then do the fsck thing.
Then fsck should be able to repair the partition, unless it is really really screwed up.
Then just type reboot and eject the CD.

Hope this helps!

I tried this, and I think the problem here is "reparing manually"

when I do fsck /dev/hda2 , it says

fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda2 failed (status 0x10). Run manually!

This is all while I'm in Rescue Mode running off the SuSE CD.

OK, it looks like a ReiserFS file system. Try the following then (still in rescue mode):

1. Do a "reiserfsck --check /dev/hda2"

2. If it says something about "fixable corruptions", do "reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda2"
OR
If it complains about "fatal corruptions", do "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/hda2". In this case it's best to make a BACKUP first because it means the partition is seriously damaged...

Good luck!

The damage is extensive, apparently, and I have no idea what I did to cause it in the first place... 4 days on linux and I already screwed up my first install

Oh well, reinstallation it is. Thanks for the help tho.

No problem. Strange though, ReiserFS is a pretty solid thingy... If you get this again after reinstalling, it could be helpful to drop a post in the laptop forum... See I once knew someone with a laptop that kept screwing up his hard drive; turned out, when the laptop goes into suspend the BIOS saves all RAM contents to disk, and his BIOS apparently wrote it right onto his linux partition !!! like it didn't know it couldn't use that disk area.

Just to say, if the problem persists, it could be laptop-specific...

good luck with it anyway.

nukkel

I got a simillar message but for another reason. I have my boot system in the mbr of hda while my SuSE 9.1 system is in hdb8. I removed hda from my system and hdb became hda. I installed another copy of SuSE on hda9 and added the previous copy to its boot list because I did not know how to do that in the mbr. Now when I start SuSE (hda8) I get :

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/

I did as you mentioned above:

"reiserfsck --check /dev/hda8"

and do "reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda8"

and both told me no corruptions. Can you help me?

Hi,

sounds wierd,
have you tried booting the newer system (on hda9) and check the older system from there?

It can also be, the older SuSE still thinks it has to boot from hdb8; in that case, make sure that, in the LILO boot config, the "root=..." line for the old SuSE is set to /dev/hda8.

Thanks for reply.
Yes, I am able to boot the new system on hda9, but what should I do to check the older system?
This is what I have in the grub file:
kernel (hd0,7) /boot/valinuz root=/dev/hda8 ......
initrd (h0,7)/boot/initrd

I have started the resecue mode in the older system and installed a new kernel hoping that it will solve the problem by making a new initrd and valinuz but no success. What should I do? Any idea?

I have a problem just like those above, just that i know what could cause it . In my PC i have slack running on hdb2 with the ext2 fs, and i made 3 accounts, me and my two brothers beside the root. Me and the bigger are the only ones that knows the root pass and know how to power down from an user session(that's using th "su" command), but my smaller bro doesn't knows the root pass, so he cant power down, so he just turns off the PC without unmounting the HDs, and i know linux is very sensitive about that(it runs a forced check every time this happens).So, now it seems to happen the same thing as mr_a_li.

I would like to know how to use the fsck to check the dev( i have the rescue disk so i can do it from there) and how to let my bro's session power down without asking the root password.

I managed to solve the problem by making my hard disk to boot as slave (hdb). Thanks.

very strange...

well, what matters is it works

I found out what was the problem, i coul only solve it by reinstalling my slack again. Thanks for the effort

I had the same problem. I found the fix for my situation. It started when I installed a new slave drive on my system. There were entries in the /etc/fstab file that were still referencing partitions on the old drive. So, every time the system tried to process the "non-existant" partitions, the result would be the error:

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/




I then edited the fstab file to comment out the device missing partition entries and I was basck in business! My system would once again boot normally

Hope this helps someone.

Thank you, Thank you people. I just spent a frustrating couple of hours unable to boot, just because I played around with the partition table (*slaps self).

This thread got me going again (especially the bit about editing out the missing partition).