Bloody typical...I'd just decided to rebuild my XP machine, and was backing up files to my MDK machine when one of the disks died! I have two HDDs in the MDK box, one containing all the major filesystems like /, /sbin, /etc, /var and so on and another 40GB IBM drive which just had one filesystem mounted on it which I had shared out through Samba.


I was copying files across from the WinXP machine to the MDK box onto the drive holding the shared filesystem when everything just hung (I thought it was Windows at first). I switched to the MDK machine but could not browse the file systems on the second drive without hanging Nautilus. I could (at first) see the contents through the command prompt, but after a while even that stopped working. I tried doing an ll in the filesystem and it hung the prompt.

Decided to try a reboot but it would not go down. Dropped out of X to console but still no joy and there were some user owned process that even a kill -9 would not see off as root.

Gave up and decided to button the box, but on coming back up in the BIOS screen a message popped up...."Sec Slave not responding". Doh!

OK, so I disabled this drive in the BIOS (seeing as it has no critical file systems on it. I boot MDK, but got as far as it complaining that the system had not come down cleanly and that some filesystems were screwed. The usual fsck questions were asked before it dropped me to a command line. However, I cannot fix up the filesystem cuz the drive is dead (it's been iffy for a while) so I thought I'd try to edit /etc/fstab to stop the system trying to even mount this fs but you can't run vi from this prompt.

I'm a bit stuck now, I can't boo the system...any ideas???

Thanks!

Ah, actually I think I've just sorted this....

I found /bin/vim-minimal and ran /usr/vim-minimal /etc/fstab and remove the entry to the failed drive and the system appears to be booting OK.

I last installed Fedora Core1 on hda. at the time it was the only hd i had in the machine. later I added 2 fat32 hds. I then proceeded to fubar some of the windoze partitions (all my fault).

Then I removed the win hds and now linux won't boot.
it says it has "dropped to a shell"
I am a newbie and am hoping you can give me some advice.

tia

When you are "dropped to a shell" the OS is giving you a chance to fix whatever is wrong (the thing that caused the problem in the first place). This is strictly CLI stuff. If linux is having trouble with reading a drive it will balk during the boot. The best way to get around this is to comment out the fstab entry for that specific drive. I use nano, but that's just personal preference. You'll still have to figure out what's wrong with the drive, but you'll be able to use your linux distro, at least.