"fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot" after chaning non-system partition
 

I was replacing partitions with the suse partitioner.

I had 3 primary partitions(swap, / and home) at the begining of my drive and an extended partition at the end. The extended partition contained a 20 gig ext3 partition, a 20 gig reiser partition, and a 70 gig fat32 partition at the end of it. I deleted the fat32 logical partition, and replaced it with a 63 gig reiser partition and a 7 gig fat partition, but after I hit finish it gave some kind of error message about not being able to mount something, (IIRC the 20 gig reiser logical partition). When I rebooted it wouldn't start up normally, these are the last lines after booting:

"Loading console font lat9w-16.psfu -m trivial (K

fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root
file system is currently mounted read only. To remount it
read write do:

bash# mount -n -o remount,rw /

Attention: Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this
maintenance mode. shutdown or reboot will not work.
Give root password fol login:"

What could be the problem? What should I make sure to avoid doing? What could I do to fix it? Boot from the install CD and use the rescue function? Use a live CD to try to fix it with QTparted?

I haven't touched the / , /home or swap partitions, and I'm not dual booting.

When I replaced 10 and 30 gig fat32 logical partitions with the 20 gig reiser and ext3 ones, the hda* numbers of the logical partitions stopped correlating with their physical order.

Just because you used standard resizers dosn't mean it worked. The system is telling you you the root file system is suspect.

The system wants you to run fsck -ACV -r (since the root fs is mounted read only -ACRV if you follow instructions to mount read-write)

You can fine tune this - read fsck(8) for details.

But I didn't resize anything. I just replaced a partition with two new ones.

Exactly.

Okay, don't panic, there are several possibilities.

First, you deceide how much control you want.

If you feel unsure, use the rescue function and see what it tells you. You don't have to commit any changes it suggests.

QT-Parted might help but I'm not sure about its repair routines or whether it has any at all.

If you use fschk, you first have to screen the output of the boot-process to find out which partition is really suspect. Depending from the type of file-system on it, fschk has differing options (reiser probably needs a --rebuild-tree, ext3 something else, use the man pages).

The partitions in the extended (logical) partition start with the number 5 (e.g. hdx5). So with only swap, / and home you have no hdx4 partition.

The rescue function in yast?

I was thinking of using it to remove partitions that could be a problem. I'm not anymore since I noticed that I can still use the text mode yast, and that my knoppix CD is damaged.




I tried "fsck -CV /dev/hda1" to "fsck -CV /dev/hda8"

for "fsck -CV /dev/hda2", it said

"Partition /dev/hda2 is mounted with write permisions, cannot check it
fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda2 failed (status 0x10). Run manually!"

hda3, 5, 6 and 8 seemed to be fine

"fsck -CV /dev/hda7" resulted in something about not being able to find a superblock, and said that if there really is a reiser filesystem on the partition, then the superblock is corrupted, and said to add an extra argument to reiserfsck to rebuild the superblock. When I ran that it said
"superblock can't be found
what version of reiser?"

there's nothing on that partition, so I'd prefer to just reformat it with yast.

In the yast partitioner, I noticed that under hda3 the mount point was blank, instead of being /home. Does this mean that that partition just isn't mounted at the moment, or that it's mounting point somehow got changed?

your mount points will be identified in either fstab or in mtab. Check them both to make sure that you have the correct partitions associated with the correct mount points (at least for tht system).

M. Lacy
Western Tool Supply

I formatted hda7 and it now boots properly. That is it started booting, but gave an error message saying it couldn't write to the home directory, apparently yast screwed up some of the other settings and removed the mount points. After I set the hda3 mount point back to /home it booted fine.

When I reset the mount points for hda5 and hda6, hda5 appears to work fine, but hda6 is gone. Apparently somewhere along the line it somehow got changed from ext3 to reiser. I tried changing it from reiser to ext3 in fstab, but that didn't help, it just kept it from booting, with a fsck errer, just like before. So I removed its line from fstab.

What are the chances that I can get that partition back?

No, I meant booting from the install CD. Just say that you want to install manually, it will detect then an already installed system and asks whether it should try to repair...

Well, you can use SuSE's install CD, see above...

Yeah well ;):Most probably version 3.6. What argument did you use? "--rebuild-tree" would maybe help (man fschk).

LAST POST:

Well if it did get changed, you can use fdisk and reset the file type of the partition with that. fstab won't change anything, it is just a conglomeration ;) of argumets for an automatic mount during boot up (or mount -a).

JZL240I-U is your freind.

umount /dev/hda2
fsck -CV /dev/hda2

or

fsck -CRV /dev/hda2

since the fs is mounted read/write.
(see post #2)

if the -A option was included, it wouldn't have been nessisary to step through each partition in turn.

[gloat]
As is seen, even though the software was supposed to be able to resize partition (removing one and adding two in it's place counts) non-destructively, we see that it hasn't. Mountpoints are off, and an additional reiser partition was created.[/gloat]

Doing everything from the rescue CD is, indeed, best.
As the errant partitions come under scrutiny, the solution will present itself.

I take it's possible to unmount the / partition?

"--rebuildsb" I think.

And after that I'll still have to use a data recovery program to get that partition, or most of it, back?

One thing that really annoys me is that it made it difficult to notice when this happened because it hides the filesystem type, and instead just says it's a linux partition. It doesn't make sense, it gives dire warnings that using it is for experts only, but hiddes the complexity.

If you have some CDRs that aren't garbage.

Thanks for everything.

I tried testdisk, it didn't find the lost ext3 partition, although it did see one of my original 3 fat32 partitions, which I overwrote a while ago and I filled up the partition I created over it almost completely, so I don't think I have any chance of restoring my lost ext3 partition as a whole, especially by simply changing that partition from reiser to ext3 with fdisk. (Although I'll still try a few more data recovery tools)

In hindsight, I think I should have tried just removing that defective empty partition from etc/fstab instead of formating it.

You can. But then the system won't really work anymore. Better to use a live CD.

None too exact a disclosure ;).

No, if your statement in fstab is correct it should work as it is after reboot or you have to mount by hand.

Dunno what you mean, I never had any problem with it (though I used only in manual mode and told it exactly what I wanted, no proposals by YAST accepted ;)).

You might download or borrow some?

Houw could it possibly? It is changed to an other type in the partition table...

Then you'd lost the space. Normally it is possible to do what you originally wanted.

I meant the physical CDR media.

But it saw a long ago erased and overwriten fat32 partition. I think it might have even seen my old ext3 / partition which I replaced with a reiser / partition.

No, I meant to put off dealing with it until I understand it better.

Sure. You download an .iso image and burn it to a CD to be used as I proposed ... or I fail to understand your problem.

Sure. The partition table is not zeroed out when you delete / erase something. Just the boundaries of the other partitions are adjusted.

Whoa here. What did you do? If you replaced an ext3 with reiser actively from within YAST it is formatted. If just the type of partition was changed (e.g. with fdisk) you can change it back and maybe save your data.

But this is how you learn best, i.e. with an actual mistake. Just give it a try :).