Gidday

On a Sun Ultra10 333MHz, 512M, 9gB HDD. Booting Fedora-9. Silo v1.4.14 into kernel 2.6.27 64bit (vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-78.2.9fc9.sparc64). This is a brand-new installation.

Booting merrily, in the interactive startup section just past "Starting udev", "Setting hostname", at "Checking filesystems" I get:

/: clean, 155284/557056 files, 920932/2225412 blocks
fsck.ext2: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program? [FAILED]

*** An error occured during the filesystem check
*** Dropping you to a shell, the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell
*** Warning --SELinux is active
*** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
*** Run 'setenforce 1" to reenable
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

I found the file rc.sysinit contains the instruction for this part of the boot process, however, just commenting out the offending lines may get the system to boot but it does not fix the underlying problem.

Just what the underlying problem is has me flummoxed. You might know what it is, if so I'd be appropriately grateful if you would share the fix with me.

Regards
Peter

When you got to he shell (after the abort) did you kind out which process had /dev/sda mounted? (And, why is /dev/sda being checked? I don't use SUN OS, but isn't it unusual that /dev/sda apparently contains a single ext2 file system and no partitions?

From the output you posted, it looks like / is on some other device, since that check finished.

If I were you, I'd review my /etc/fstab to make sure that I'd not neglected a partition number after a /dev/sda in the first column.

Hmm, good advice, In fact fstab was OK.

Don't worry about it being on a Sun. It's LINUX and that's that. It looks just like a PC.

/dev/sda is divided up thus:
/dev/sda1 /boot (128MB) ext2
/dev/sda2 swap (1028kB)
/dev/sda4 / (8900k) ext3

And I think this may be the problem - ext3. What I'm doing now is reinstalling and I've formatted sda4 as ext2 to see if this fixes is. I've not been able to boot into filesystems with ext3 in the past.

Of course I'll post the results here too.

:-) Peter

Right, I reinstalled it.

It rebooted and did a filesystem check saying the last check was in the future. It rebooted after the fsck.

Now it's checking again - while I type this...It's doing /dev/sdb and same deal. It wants me to go into maintenance mode.

In fstab, following "defaults" it has 1 2. I cant change it to 0 0. It is a read only filesystm. Nothing I'm doing lets me edit and save my changes.Now I've

init 5

I thinks it's strugling against ro filesystem. Plus I can't find my glasses and everything's fuzzy. :-) I've just ^c to get back to my prompt so I can see if

lsmod

produces anything. And it dows, most of hte expected modules are runmning. Despite my ^c earlier, it's still trying to load services et al.

init: prefdm main process ended respawning
init: prefdm respawning too fast, stopped

Despite all that it's rebooted. Same thing it says:

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

except that Ctrl-D doesn't respond and it chokes on the root password a few times. After it reports back that:

bash: [: =: unary operator expected
bash: /usr/bin/id: no such file or directory I'm dropped into a

(repair filesystem) 1# prompt. So I'll run fsck.ext2 on everything it won't let me do /devf/sda naturally so I:

e2fsck -f /dev/sdb it's going to take a while so I'll umount /dev/sda4 and check it later, now I'm just going to post this.

:-) Peter

OK, a few comments:

• If your root fs is mounted ro and it's not the fs with the problem, try a mount / -o remount,defaults,rw to remount it as a writable fs.
• fsck can not be run on a partitioned device since each partition is a separate file system. Thus a fsck /dev/sdb will almost always fail or, even worse, try to "fix" something that's not fixable.
• fsck automatically detects the file system in the partition to which it's pointed.
• The only difference between a ext2 and a ext3 file system is the presence of the journal file in the ext3 one. You can use the tune2fs program to convert an ext2 fs to a ext3 one, and vise versa.
• The same program (e2fsck) is used by fsck to check an ext2 fs and an ext3 one, so you gained nothing by making /dev/sda4 a ext2 fs. That it seemed to make a difference suggests,to me, that you may have hardware problems. (Suggestion: Replace the cables connection the drives to the mother board with "round" cables. Air flow is improved and cross-talk reduced.)
• Support for Fedora 10 will be terminated one month after Fedora 12 is released this November. Fedora 9 support was terminated several months ago. Using an unsupported distribution means that you'll have to back-port any security fixes to your system yourself. This is a daunting task, not one to be lightly assumed.