Topic: Boot Error !!!

[bluejuice]

Let me kick this off with "i'm a newbie" ok now thats clear ..heres the problem.

I am running SME 6.0 on a 120GB HDD. Its been running well for about 5 months, I leave it on for periods of "weeks" without issues. Yesterday however we had a series of power failures, thankfully I have a UPS and managed to shutdown safely, however the power failures continues to plague the day. In the end my server failed to boot up.

During the typical system check on startup I recieved the following:

EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,3)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=xxxxx block=xxxxxx

the numbers (xxxxxxx) ascending as the error message would repeat for serveral minutes finally concluding with:

Couldn't find matching filesystem: LABEL=/

*** and error occurred during the file system check
***dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
***when you leave the shell
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal start up):

once i have type the root password i recieve:

(Repair file system) 1 #

At this point i have tried the following commands
fsck / -v-y
fsck /dev/hda1 -v-y
fsck /dev/hda2 -v-y
e2fsck -cc -C -f -v /dev/hda1
as adviced on other similar forum topics...ultimately the results the same, I recieve:

bash: fsck : No such file or directory
(Repair filesystem) 2 #

and so it goes on....what am i supposed to do, continue typing in commands....I have tried just typing y through to (Repair filesystem) 800 #

I need help.
(remember the first line..Im a newbie...so anyone kind enough to offer advice please keep instructions clear and basic)

[ldkeen]

BJ,
First you have to make sure exactly where your / partition is mounted. My guess is it's probably /dev/hda3 but you will need to fire up fdisk to make sure:
#fdisk /dev/hda
then type "p" to Print the partition table
#p
Now study the output, you will have one swap partition and two linux partitions, the largest of the two linux partitions is your root partition. This is the partition that needs to be fsck'd.
Now type "q" to quit without making any changes
#q
I can't remember the exact command but try:
#e2fsck -cyvf /dev/hda3
If that doesn't work do a man e2fsck or google it. It looks like a bad message though  
Lloyd

[bluejuice]

lloyd

Ok i followed your advice and got as far as entering the command e2fsck -cyvf /dev/hda3 (hda3 was indeed my root partition)

I recieved the following alert:
The superblocx could not be read or does not descibe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternative superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

#

how should i preceed???

Oh...incidently I recieved an alert when viewing partitions informing that i have 19929 cyclinders and suggesting that this could cause problems with software that runs at boot time (old Lilo) or booting partitions from other OS (dos fdisk, os/2)
Should i heed this alert, could this have caused the crash?

[ldkeen]

Hi BJ,
I'm afraid I can't be much help here. I do know that you have some corruption on /dev/hda3 and it doesn't look good. If you're running SME 6.0 then the filesystem should be ext3 so maybe try running fsck -c /dev/hda3 as per other posts - just remember the syntax, it's <command><options><device> (e2fsck is for ext2 partitions, but I think it still works on ext3)

Oh...incidently I recieved an alert when viewing partitions informing that i have 19929 cyclinders and suggesting that this could cause problems with software that runs at boot time (old Lilo) or booting partitions from other OS (dos fdisk, os/2)

This message doesn't indicate a problem, it's just advising you that you have a HDD that excedes the 1024 cylinder boundary.