[vox-tech] Red Hat system check

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin: Ehrhart, Jay <ehrhart@ycoe.org> quote
> Over the weekend, my ofice lost power, the UPS was depleted and my Red Hat
> 7.0 box went down.
> Now I am having errors when I try to bring it backup. This is what happens;
> The boot starts normally.
> The message "contains a file system with errors, check forced" appears.
> "Unexpcted Inconsistency; run fsck manually"
> "An 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 startup"
> 
> If I use control-D, it reboots and brings me back to the same place.

control d isn't what you want to do.

> When I enter the password and enter maintenance it shows;
> "Repair filesystem 1 #"

> So what do I need to do after I enter the password and enter maintenance to
> repair this?

the filesystem can be corrupted if the hard drive loses power during a write
operation (or a few other conditions).  fsck wants to make sure your
filesystem is ok.

apparently, on of your partitions has an error on it that fsck wants to fix.
the error is serious enough that fsck wants human intervention.  but ext2 is
a very resiliant filesystem, and fsck is a very intelligent program.   what
fsck wants to do is almost certain to be the right thing, but it still wants
confirmation.

you need to figure out on which partition fsck failed.  usually, when you
watch the system boot, it'll tell you.   something like:


Checking /dev/hda3
============================================ /                   63%
Filesystem inconsistancy.  Please run fsck manually (without the -a option).


i've never seen "repair filesystem 1 #" but perhaps that means /dev/hda1
needs to be repaired?

if you can't tell, just fsck all the partitions.  you can't hurt anything.
as long as the partition is unmounted, or at least mounted as read-only.

after doing this, you can safely reboot the system.

btw, you may want to use fsck -y which answers "yes" to all of fsck's
questions.

pete

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