System locks up on boot
 

OS) RH 7.3

Hello, We had a power outage the other night due to a electrical storm and around that time I started having problems.... 1st I noticed the screen saver had froze the whole system was locked up, nothing worked ... ctl alt backspace wouldn't restart X so I rebooted ..... it seemed ok for a bit then it locked up again ....I restarted it, got 1/2 way thru loading KDE when it locked up again..... If I force a file system check it gets to 13.2 % then lockes up.......Does this sound like a OS problem or a hardware problem?


"peace out"

First thing you need to do is temporarily get rid of booting in GUI mode, reboot into single mode and then recheck your partitions. If you are certain one partition at least is clean, mount it read/write mode and save the fsck log there, look at the details and fish out of /lost+found what you can, then check your rpm database for any errors on installed packages, because you may have some stuff missing.

*If you did install Aide, Samhain or tripwire, use that instead of checking the rpm database. These apps are (if configured OK) much more reliable finding anomalies.

There is a command line program for checking the file system... Do you recall what it is?

Thanks!

run #e2fsck <device name> to check for the file system errors

#e2fsck -cv <device name> will check for bad blocks and then marks them bad , in verbose mode

you can also use #dumpe2fs <device name> with various options to check your file system.

Refer man pages for details.

To debug a filesystem, use #debugfs , make sure all these are done on umounted file systems.

check these out