Hi,
someone gave me a laptop with both fedora and windows 7 installed. Windows never run, always had an error, but fedora was ok. Recently, it stopped working, displaying the following message:
An error occurred during the file system check.
Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
when you leave the shell.
Warning -- SELinux is active
Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
Run 'setenforce1' to reenable.
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

Note: I've never worked with Linux before, I've always used this laptop only to go to the internet and so... But I really like to repair it if you help me, instead of going to a store and have someone else doing it by me! I'd like to learn how to fix it myself! Would someone help me? Baby steps, please!
Thank you!!
*Mags*

This
is the first thing to do.
Giving the root (aka admin) passwd will get you into the cmd line. (Ask the orig owner if you don't know the passwd)
Note that nothing appears as you type it in, not even dots or '*'s, for security.
Then type in this cmd
then hit the Enter key and it'll attempt to repair the file system.

You should know that this version is waaay out of date and no longer updated, thus leaving you open to security holes.
I think the latest Fedora is v19.

IF you want to update, you'll have to backup any important data and do a fresh install of the latest.
At this point you obviously have the option of using a different Linux distribution, see www.distrowatch.com.
You'll find lots of threads here asking what's 'best'. In fact there's no such thing, but for a non-tech person, Linux Mint is very popular at the moment, see the other threads.
Doing a fresh install will also allow you to re-use the disk space currently taken by Windows, thus giving you more space.

HTH

1 members found this post helpful.

You were probably given this because the hard drive is failing on it. If both systems have file errors, that's a good guess. I'd run a diagnostic on the hard drive before wasting any time on it.

I recommend to buy a new hard drive and do a fresh install of a supported operating system. Running someone else's inherited 2nd-hand operating system always makes me feel dirty; best to start fresh IMHO.

You can hopefully use a Linux Live CD to rescue any documents/files you have on the failing hard drive.

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With this tips I was able to restart the laptop in about 5 minutes. I never thought it would be so easy and whithin my reach to do it.

Thank you very, very much.

Mags.