FSCK help please....
 

I am a very new user to Linux, I have managed to power off my system without shutting it down properly, now when I boot up it tells me to run fsck without the -a or -p parameters, when I try this it scrolls down the screen forever, I gace up at 200, is there any way around this or so I don't need to type this in forever to allow me to get into my system. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

It may be faster to reinstall linux, unfortunately. What fsck is trying to tell you by saying it don't run fsck with the a or the p switch is that there are enough problems with your filesystem that it doesn't wan't to fix them automatically. Normally when a system gets powered down there aren't a whole lot of things that fsck has to fix, so it will do it automatically. It sounds like you are having to fix so many problems by answering yes and it just keeps finding another problem...

I've only seen this type of behavior 1 time from fsck and it was on a "second" disk other than the one that was "hosting" linux. When I would start from scratch on the second disk by using (fdisk, mkfs, and fsck -- I'm not suggesting this as a fix to your issue) fsck would give me so many errors on a newly created file system it was ridiculous. It turned out to be a bug in the kernel that shipped with my distribution, and updating the kernel fixed it.

Unfortunately I don't have an easy solution for you, unless installing linux was easy for you the first time :) Hopefully someone more experienced than me can help.

If you have extra disk space, you might be able to do another "parallel" linux installation , and then try to fix the file systems that have your data on them - truly I have no experience with linux this way.

I do have a couple of questions that might get more info from you tho

What is your linux distribution or kernel?
How big was the file system that fsck is complaining about?
Was there a bunch of data on it you need to keep?

U could always try the fsck with the a or p option.
be adventurous, that's what linux is all about........

You should try what divad suggests, for sure. Your experience of having to fix problem after problem before giving up because it is taking too much time suggests to me that running fsck with the a or the p option will come back with the fabled "run fsck without the -a or -p parameters" that you already have run into when booting your system. I am making an educated guess here that when I boot and fsck fixes problems for me "automatically", that it means fsck was run with one of the options that says "fix stiff automatically", such as "-a" or "-p". I don't want to discourage you from trying those switches, but I presume you already have :)