After an improper shutdown, I Redhat 9 boots and looks gives filesystem error. It asks me if I want to repair or just reboot which takes me in a circle. When I choose to repair. It says:
(Repair filesystem1)#

If I hit yes it flips out and goes to a blank screen with a bunch y's down the page and does nothing. I don't know commands in this mode. Can someone help me to repair and get it back up and running? Thanks. It worked fine before.

What caused the improper shutdown? More importantly, what was happening when that happened? What was running, and what were you doing?

Ok, so now to answer your question:
When you get to the prompt mentioned above, try to see what's mounted and how it's mounted, to do this type:
mount
It should show you what's mounted, and what options it was mounted with. What you need to look for is to see if your / filesystem is mounted read-only. If it is (we hope) then you can safely run your fsck (read Scan Disk) on the disk. So, now you need to know what device to check. To find which device it is, you can either look at mount again and see what device / is mounted on; OR you can use fdisk to display your devices:
/sbin/fdisk -l (/SBIN/FDISK -L lowercase)
And then run fsck on that device similar to:
fsck -p /dev/hda1
Where /dev/hda1 is the device it actually is.

Be careful, and good luck!

Cool

The system had locked up on me and that's why I originally improperly shut it down. Now, I try the mount command and get the boot partition and root partition.
Here is the output from

(Repair filesystem) 1 # mount

/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw,defaults)
/dev/hda2 on /boot type ext3 (rw,defaults)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5, mode=620)
none on /proc type proc (rw,defaults)

I ran fsck and it seems to boot fine now. How can I troubleshoot it when it locks up. Is there something similar to ctrl+alt+del to try and kill applications. What can I do in that situation?