Hi,
Recently my machine running Debian froze when I restarted it it would give me a message that could not load root fs. Few hundred lines before this message it also said some thing about EXT2 fs. I wanted to know is there any way of reviewing the machine or if there is a possibility of retrieving the data on it.

thanks

abhijit

Could you give us some more info, like what happened or what you did before this happened? If you don't have an older kernel that you could try and boot, and no rescue disk/cd, then try booting tomsrtbt.

Well this happened over the memorial day weekend I have no clue what happened since after I came back to work on Tuesday the system was not responding so I restarted it.
the last few lines it spits out are

EXT2-fs: ide0(3,1): Couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features
Invalid session number or type of track
Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:01

thanks

abhijit

Get tomsrbt and then run a fsck on your root partition...
Good luck!

I ran a e2fsck on the root and was able to get it to boot. But now it want load /home and other partitions. when I try to mount them it says
chicoma:~# mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /mnt
mount: fs type ext3 not supported by kernel

here is a dump of my /etc/fstab file

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /home ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/dev/md0 /data ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy auto defaults,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noauto 0 0

do I have to configure the kernel?

thanks

Probably when you booted, the propper modules were not loaded. Check to see if /lib/modules exists...

It does exist and has the following 2 directories

2.2.20 2.4.17

abhijit

maybe you were running 2.4.17 and had stuff formatted
as ext3, and now you're running 2.2.20, and it doesn't
support ext3. you can change the ext3's back to ext2,
but i forgot the command. tune2fs something.