Hi,
i have a problem , i started my laptop(Dell Inspiron 6400 installed with Fedora 7 ) then i starts normally but when it starts displaying that services are started it displays that all those services are not directory
so i can't enter in fedora because when i write root to enter i tell me login incorrect. i think it can be due from instabillity of electricity coz where i work , power cut off any moment.
so i wonder fedora has been damaged ?? if it is what can i do ??

help me

Unless your laptop's battery is defective a power outage should only have switched you to you laptop's battery power. So that's not likely to be your problem.

From your description it sounds to me much more likely that your laptop's hard drive is failing. (Laptop hard drives are likely to fail, especially when the laptop is moved or, worse, dropped when the drive is spinning.) Do you have a "Fedora 8 Live CD" from which you could boot your laptop? (Assuming, of course, that you have a CD reader in you laptop, and that you can set your BIOS to boot from it.) If you do, you could (1) check you HD and (2) attempt to fix it (e.g., run fsck on /dev/mapper/LogVol00/VolGroup01 - or 00, I forget what FC7's default was. WARNING: Never run fsck on a device containing a logical volume group. Doing so will destroy the whole volume group.)

If the Live CD can access the Fedora 7 root logical volume, I'd recommend backing anything on your laptop you'd like to save before proceeding with other repair options.

I haven't a Fedora 8 Live CD , instead i get a Fedora 8 Installer CD , can i use it ?About my Fedora 7 , i can't login in coz when i enter root as login it tells me login incorrect and it is not my battery it is just fedora coz i have 2 partitions , one for fedora and another for windows , this one works very well but in fedora i can't even login in and give messages that services can't be started coz are not directories.
I have tried to install Fedora 8 to update my fedora 7 and it give a message that /tmp/ can't be accessed is not directory.
Can u explain me more about recover data coz i fear that all my data can be lose ,

I used a Fedora 7 installer CD and i choose Rescue installed Mode and teh after it gives me a message that all my data are mounted to /mnt/sysimage and i do cd /mnt/sysimage and i find all my data.So how can i backup those data ??

help me

Assuming you have a blank CD and the laptop can write to the CD, us k3b or a similar tool to write the data to as many CDs as you need in order to back up your data.

<edit>Note that you really only need to back up data that you've created, usually in /home/uxan assuming that uxen is your FC7 user name. You can always reconstruct the rest of your system from the Internet if something goes wrong.</edit>

Note that, since you can access the data via the chroot /mnt/sysimg command, you drive is probably not very damaged.

Once you copied the data you need to save to CDs, boot from the rescue CD (as you've already done) but this time do the following:
1) Do the chroot /mnt/sysimage
2) Enter the command cat /etc/fstab | grep -i vol to list all references to anything with "vol" in it. (This assumes that you used the default Fedora setup.) Here's an example from my laptop where I've used a different volume group name (MX6436)-- not the default.)The first entry is the name by which the logical volume is known to the system. You want the one with the ext3 in the line. That's your "root" file system.
3) Enter the command exit to undo the effect of the chroot command.
4) Issue the command umount /mnt/sysimage to unmount it.
5) Assuming the name you found in step 2 was /dev/VolGrp00/LogVol00, issue the command fsck /dev/VolGrp00/LogVol00 to try to repair the logical volume.

Good luck.

I did this command (cat /etc/fstab | grep -i vol) but it gives nothing ,i excute it then i return to the command shell.
Yestarday i tried with a Mandriva Live cd and i arrive to access my data but when i want to see data located in my account /home/uxan it refuses it give a message that "Can't read data in this user account", it is like it is protected.My user account gets a password is that the problem??

i started downloading Fedora 8 Live cd , to see if it can help me but if the user is protected by password there is a possibility to break it?

help me

Well, two points: First, when you logged in from the rescue disk, you were logged in as "root," and the only "password protection" that would prevent "root" from looking at /home/uxan's files would be if some of uxan's files were encrypted.

The second point is that the message you quoted -- "Can't read data in this user account" -- is not the message you would have received if there was a problem with the permissions needed to access the file. That message would have been a curt "Permission denied."

So, given those two observations, I suspect that the message was trying to tell you that the disk drive contents have been corrupted.

I think that, at this point, you need to make a choice of alternative courses of action:

1) You could choose to risk loosing you data by proceeding without a backup. This sometimes works, but, if it doesn't, you're "out of luck."

2) You could choose to try to create an image of the (corrupted) data using the "dd" or "dd_rescue" commands to copy a byte image of the whole drive to, say, an external USB drive. Then, once that image is secure, run the fdisk sequence I suggested in my last post. If the fdisk failed to recover the file system, you could, potentially, use file recovery tools (e.g., foremost, etc.) to reconstruct some of the data from the image. (Usually dd_rescue is a better choice since dd tends to "halt" when it encounters any problem.) By the way, once you have the image file, you could try running fdisk on it instead of the actual hard drive. The procedure for doing so is, however, somewhat involved.

3) You could hire a commercial data recovery company to recover your data. (Typically, this option is too expensive for any but the most critical, irreproducible, data. $1,000 to $100,000 depending on the complexity of the recovery.)