I apologize if this isn't the best forum for this post, but I thought this could be classified as a newbie question.

I have worked for a very small business for years, and we use a computer with RedHat Linux for our accounting program. The computer and proprietary accounting program was built for us years ago. We utilize the accounting program on our PC's through the office network and a TinyTerm Emulator program, so the main Linux computer is in a closet and never gets shut down regularly. In March of 2016, our battery backup died and we were forced to shut the main computer down and reboot. When we rebooted, we got an error screen saying we had been sent to a shell. We eventually searched and found a fsdk command and eventually got the computer back up and running. Everything has been fine since then. Now, our company has shut down and my supervisor had to take the Linux computer home for final accounting purposes at year-end. This is the first time the computer has been shut down since March and rebooted. When she attempted to turn the computer on once it was set up at her house, the same error screen reappeared. She tried the same fsdk command that worked before, but it is not working this time. The screen says
"Checking root filesystem
/dev/sda5 contains a file system with errors, check forced. Error reading block 1933379 (Attempt to reach block from filesystem.......
/dev/sda: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY......
FAILED
An error occurred during the file system check. Dropping you to a shall; the system will reboot when you leave the shell. Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D for normal startup):"

We tried the password and it just restarts. We tried the Control-D to no avail. We tried fsck -y /dev/sda5 (the fix we used last time) but it doesn't seem to be working. We are obviously not familiar with fixing Linux problems and haven't had anyone to help us in years. Any advice on what type of commands to try would be so appreciated. Thanks for any help.........

This is a really scary conversation.

This system has had no updates to the operating system/programs in years ?.
Try this command and post the result - it will give us an idea of how old that (operating) system isThe shell you drop to is a very limited environment - the age of your environment may make it even more so than we are used to these days.
Do you have (good) backups ?. When was the last backup taken, and how (what command) was the backup created ?.

A not so graceful shutdown and or power outage isn't good. I sincerely hope you have backups.

IF you don't have a subscription with Red Hat I suggest giving Centos a try.
Centos is the rebuild of Red Hat if your interested.
https://www.centos.org/download/

First thing you should do is verify you have good backups, and know how to restore those backups to a new machine. It kinda sounds like the hard drive is failing.

You should get your backups before you start running any kind of diagnostic software, if a drive is failing often the testing tools will make the situation worse, not better.

1 members found this post helpful.

Be aware that we are actually trying to help. We all deliberately refrained from answering your question because there is a large risk of making matters worse - including using fsck.

You will need to provide more detail.

It could be a disk drive error..

Probably best to download a 'live' distro, it boots up the computer without touching your hard drive, & make a back up copy of your disk, then work on the backup copy.

Check out this web site/distro. http://www.clonezilla.org/

1 members found this post helpful.

Could be a bad sector on the HDD:-

I'd be interested in seeing the output of uname -a like syg00 has asked for.

I agree with fatmac's advise on this because we don't know what the fs errors are.

eleanorrigby08:

Please post the output of uname -a for us.
Also what is the output of:

Thank you all for your replies. I will try to get this information to my supervisor and we will see what happens (since the computer is at her house). I'll post results when I can.

We do have backups, but since the company has shut down and we only needed the accounting for final taxes, I'm not sure if it's even worth trying to deal with the backups. We may have to work with raw data we have and forget about the computer and accounting system. Our boss passed away a couple of years ago, and we have been trying to deal with the antiquated equipment just to get through the final steps of closing down his business. When he was alive, he didn't want us to spend money on changing or updating anything....leading to major problems!

... tough situation - best of luck ! Keep us apprised of your progress if you can.

Happy Holidays !

Your Welcome

Let us know how things go and try to get us the output of those commands.

I hope that you are not faced by a bunch of auditors.
It won't look good if you haven't replaced any disks for many years.

If you should get it working again, take an immediate backup - but not if it means you lose a "known good" backup.

1 members found this post helpful.

Check and look for drive errors.

They're not going to be able to clone the disk if it's failing mechanically. It's likely if you try to copy it that the copy will be corrupted in some way. Anything that stresses the disk(s) more should be avoided. If the data files are in some kind of usable format, they should be copied away somewhere if possible for later use.