redhat server down
 

Hi Guys, came in and found server not booting. it says "An error occured during the file system check. Dropping you to shell"

when i do fsck it says The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.....

i also did e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sda, it says the device or resouce busy while trying to open

Any help will be highly appreciated

You don't tell us what version of Red Hat, anything about the server, or give us many details at all. Could be anything from a failed hard drive, bad RAID, or some other cause...we can't guess based on what you posted.

Since it's Red Hat, have you contacted Red Hat support? RHEL is a pay-for distro....you are PAYING for it, right?

It sounds like the superblock has corrupted or worse, so you'll have to see if you can restore the superblock from a backup copy within the same partition. Or you could reformat the drive with a more current filesystem like ext4, then restore your data from a backup (if you have a backup of your data). You might also be wise to check the drive with smartctl too, in case you have a deeper problem with the drive itself - as there's usually a reason why filesystem superblocks corrupt.

And since RHEL is a subscription based distribution, then shouldn't you be asking Red Hat for help? If you don't want to pay for it, use CentOS instead.

I would be surprised if the filesystem was defined on the base device rather than a partition/lv. But I've been wrong plenty often.
As stated, we're all whistling dixie without relevant data.