much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

thiz linux (7.0) installed from cd fine yesterday. ran xconfigurator and set up the 1280x1024 resolution. reboot and get...

Checking root filesystem
/dev/hda2 is mounted. e2fsck: Cannot continue aborting.

*** An error occurred during the file system check
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell

so at the prompt, i let go with #fsck -f -t ext3 /dev/hda2

it (fsck1.27 [8-mar-2002]) comes back with prognostications of death and destruction and of course i really want to continue ...

/dev/hda2: recovering journal
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking ... *yawn* ... tion
/dev/hda2: 82983/522240 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 415896/1044225 blocks


ok ... so i reboot the system because i have successfully repaired my file system, eh? no. this is classic sisyphus. i tried umount and fsck and it comes back saying the disk is clean. everytime i reboot, the fsck "cannot continue" comes back like i laid it out for you (above).

wanna see my fstab?

(Repair filesystem) 2 # cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
(Repair filesystem) 3 #

i'm not averse to getting dirt under my fingernails here, but this fscking in circles thing is getting me down. i'm inclined to remove that whole fsck check line from that initsys file where it's hiding out.

suggestions fer this noob?

Ok, I'm not familiar with thiz linux at all. In fact, I've only HEARD of it... Anyway, I'll make a couple suggestions (in other words, use at your own risk... )

What I know of fsck is, first and foremost, it's NOT supposed to be run on a mounted filesystem. That appears to be your problem:
So, my first thought would be that maybe the installed boot scripts are doing things out of order. That is, perhaps they're mounting the partitions before deciding whether to run fsck. Or perhaps they intentionally mounted them, but forgot to unmount them before running fsck.

I don't know. Like I said, that would be my gut reaction.

you wrote:

"Or perhaps they intentionally mounted them, but forgot to unmount them before running fsck.

I don't know. Like I said, that would be my gut reaction."

so i looked at my own evidence of fsck / when it was umounted and it being ok and puffed myself up and ...

went to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and found the line right before the fsck that was sending me into file repair mode:

mount / -o rw,remount

and changed it to:

mount / -o ro,remount


problem solved! booting again nicely. thank you ver much.

If it works just like you want, then great! But be careful, it looks like that command will make your root filesystem read-only all the time. That might not be what you want. Then again, there may be another command in the scripts to remount it read-write later. let me know if it's good as-is or if we need to work on it some more.

as far as i can tell (and i been runnin' linux for about 5 minutes)it's good as it is ... the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit script does a little shuck and jive a further down and announces it's mounting the root fs as "rw" ...

perhaps i'll come back crying in five weeks when the fs is corrupted beyond belief, but the fsck with it (talkin' 'bout the rootfs here, son) mounted "ro" comes back clean.

i guess i'll walk tall 'til i get kicked where it counts, eh?

thanks for checking back with me!

-kf

Hi kidefruj!

I've had the same Problem like you

>> /dev/xxx is mounted. e2fsck: Cannot continue aborting.

and I found a way to make it work. I just set the last field in the /etc/fstab file in the line of my root filesystem (in your case that's /dev/hda2) from 1 to 0:

>> /dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
^-- 0

Now the root-fielesystem is not checked (again) when it's already mounted rw (see 'man fstab'), and it doesn't need to, because it is already been checked before in the bootup-process.

eD