Help! I am unable to boot into my Slackware 10.1 system
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Help! I am unable to boot into my Slackware 10.1 system
Hi,
My system running Slackware 10.1 was working fine till today morning. But now when I try to boot into it, it refuses to boot and stops at checking the root file system. The checking stops at 78% and here is what is displayed on the monitor -
Quote:
Testing root file system status: read-only filesystem
Checking root file system
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
/dev/hda5 contains a file system with errors, check forced
/dev/hdat:
Inode 348386 (/opt/kde/lib/libkparts.la) has bad mode (010)
/dev/hda5: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
(i.e. without -a or -p options)
*******************************************************
An error occured during root filesystem check
You will now be given a chance to log into the
system in single user mode to fix the problem
If you are using the ext2 file system, running
e2fsck -v -y <partition> might help
*******************************************************
Once you exit the single user shell, the system will reboot
Type control-d to rpoceed to normal startup
(or give root pass word for system maintenance).
Now when I give root password, it automatically reboots back to grub.
I do not know how to come out of this mess. Kindly help
Thanking in advance,
In order to fix the filesystem on hda5, you will need to get out of multi-user mode. You have two options as far as I can see,adityavpratap.
(1) Boot the computer. You say you have grub installed. If that starts Slackware directly, you'll have to press 'e' to enter grub's edit mode and change Slackware's kernel line: you have to add "single" there (without the double quotes of course) so that you start Slackware in "single" user mode.
If you have lilo, then you need to press <TAB> at the LILO boot screen so that you have the time to type "linux single" - assuming here that the word "linux" is the name of the LILO label that starts your Slackware.
Once you get to the command prompt, you can run either
Code:
e2fsck -v -y /dev/hda5
so that any inconsistencies are automatically repaired, or
Code:
e2fsck -v /dev/hda5
where you have to press 'y' or 'n' for every inconsistency that needs to be resolved. When that finishes, you can reboot the computer and all should be fine.
(2) If you can not get as far as to the command prompt using method (1), you will need a bootable Linux CD. That can be a Knoppix CD, or Slackware's install CD. Boot from the CD, get to a command prompt, and run
Thanks for the prompt reply.
I have grub. so I tried to add single at the end of the kernel line.
However I got stuck at the same point. When I entered the root password when asked for, to enter the single user mode, the system simple rebooted.
However I got the general idea behind your suggestion. So I I fired up PCLinuxOS (that is already installed on my system alongwith Slack and WinXP) and added /dev/hda5 (root of Slack) to the fstab.
I rebooted.
During the boot up of PCLinuxOS the /dev/hda5 was again checked and got the same error message and was prompted for root password. Upon entering the root password I was dropped to the single user mode. I gave fsck /dev/hda5. Now all the errors were set right this time.
you should really use the 2nd idea suggested by Alien Bob. By booting using Knoppix or other LiveCD, you could do the checking without mounting the partition,which is more preferable.
Ok. But right now I don't have a knoppix CD available and my Slackware install CD is corrupted.
Right now I am in PCLinuxOS. However /dev/hda5 is mounted in /mnt/hda5 through fstab. Can I comment out the entry for /dev/hda5 in fstab, reboot into PCLOS and run fsck /dev/hda5 from the command prompt
Or can I simply umount /dev/hda5 and do fsck /dev/hda5 (/dev/hda5 being the root dir for Slackware and not PCLinuxOS)?
Now when I think of it, it happened after an unclean shutdown. My KDE had died and I was unable to log out of it. So I pressed ctrl+alt+F6 and gave shutdown -h now as root.
The problem mentioned occured when I tried to boot in after this.
Distribution: Slackware & Slamd64. What else is there?
Posts: 1,705
Rep:
Maybe consider trying Reiserfs. I also run something similar to ext2 on my *BSD system, and I had to shut down hard once. It was a terrible feeling but it seems to have recovered pretty well. Reiserfs seems more tolerant of problems and replays the journal to recover any lost updates.
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