OK- I just happen to be the guy at my job who knows a little about computers, so all the sudden I'm "the computer guy". Anyways we have an intranet running on Mandrake 8.1, Which I really know nothing about. It was running very smoothly till a couple days age. Know when I try to boot it, It will go through all the checks with an OK through set hostname. Then I get a warning that:

"your /ect/fstab does not contain the fsck passno field. I will kludge things around, but you should fix as soon as you can."

Then it talls me that fsck.ext2: NULL
SuperBlock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 file system Try running e2fsck w another Block.

I have tried:
reinstalling LILO at command prompt /sbin/lilo
also I tried with grub typing grub at command prompt
Then root (hd0, 0)
then setup (hd0)
Also tried
grub-install /dev/hda

I also tried alternative backup copies from other blocks:
e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda4
e2fsck -b 16385 /dev/hda4

Nothing seems to be working. I know part of my problem is that I don't really know where the MBR is. And not having used this particular system before I don't know how it is partitioned, or where anything is mounted. Are there ways to check this. This may be a no brainer question to seasoned users, however to a rookie like myself, I'm losing much hair, Please offer assistance- Thanks to all!

"Then it talls me that fsck.ext2: NULL
SuperBlock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 file system Try running e2fsck w another Block."

I do not know exactly what your problem is. I can give you a generalized fix that will probably solve the problem. Try this:

Boot a rescue CD. There should be a rescue CD mode on your Mandrake install CD. Then run fsck against every Linux partition except swap. It is important that you tell fsck the correct file system type for each partition and you can find the file system types in /etc/fstab. So a fsck command would look something like:
fsck -t ext3 /dev/hda1
Answer yes to everything that fsck asks you. After fsck is finished look in each partition's lost+found to see if fsck put any lost files or file fragments in lost+found with a number for a name.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeB....home.page.html

Steve Stites

Thanks, I'll give it a try today. and keep you posted on my results.

Ok I booted to the Mandrake install CD(as a boot disk) when with the F1 options, and typed Rescue.
Then at the Rescue.root command line I typed fsck -t ext3 /dev/hda1
(the response was) Bash: fsck : command not found.

So I typed a few other commands I have seen floating through the forum here. When I typed e2fsck panyrcdfvistFSU
(the response was) e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS0.5b
Using EXT2FS Library ver 1.19.

Still lost, still can't boot. I don't want to re-install because all the intranet files are located somewhere on that computer, and I have no idea if they have been keeping any backups.