Hotplugging Broken and Corrupt /var/run/hotplug
 

SuSE 8.2 Pro crashed on exiting from a routine Palm Pilot update using jpilot, several weeks ago. System now hangs on boot-up, at "starting hotplugging services [". Turned off hotplugging so I can boot, but crash also left /var/run/hotplug in corrupted state: running 'ls' gives thousands of lines like

ls: usblock-1071014669-_proc_bus_usb_003_002.lock: No such file or directory
ls: _dÅ ¾]: No such file or directory
ls: _dÅ ¾]: No such file or directory
ls: _dÅ ¾]: No such file or directory

and finally exits with "ls: memory exhausted". 'rm -df /var/run/hotplug/*' runs for several minutes, then exits with no message, leaving the directory apparently unchanged, and often spontaneously exiting from the su shell I had summoned to run 'rm'. 'rmdir' won't work, giving 'directory is not empty' complaints.

Tried fsck (reiserfs), but I get a "partition is mounted with write permissions, cannot check" error. The partition is /dev/hda2, which contains the whole system except for the boot sectors, I guess, and I can't think how to unmount it and then remount it read-only, since both 'mount' and 'unmount' live in the /bin directory, which is on /dev/hda2!

No idea what to try next...

Thanks,
Denis