[SLE] Booting Problem

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To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 16:30:03 -1000

I was following Carl Spitzer's advice concerning getting my firewire drive to
let me write to it(It worked,thanks Carl). He also noticed that in my fstab
I had my floppy and dvdrecorder devices under subfs and he suggested I add
'users' to the fs= part of the media under subfs,which I did using vim. But
I still couldn't write to the floppy even though I owned it. So I decided to
run SuSEconfig-no help. Then I decided to reboot and this has led to a
serious problem for me.

When I reboot I get the message that: ' fsck failed, my / partition is being
mounted read-only' and I must login as root. However when I run mount I get
this:
(none):~#mount
/dev/hdb2 on / type(reseiserfs) (rw)
/dev/hdb2 on / type(reseiserfs) (rw)
Two entries for the same file system! And the filesystem is mounted (rw).

Running: (none):~#fsck fails and I'm told to run it manually.
But when I run fsck.reseiserfs --fix-fixable I get this:
(none):~#fsck.reseiserfs --fix-fixable
Partition /dev/hdb2 is mounted with write permissions, cannot check it.
When I mount the system read-only it gets checked but nothing gets fixed.

The first time this happened four days ago I was able to solve it by checking
the 'initialize the / partition' box in the bootloader configuration dialogue
in the rescue script of the 9.1 installation disk. But this time that
doesn't work. I've also tried reloading a generic copy of the boot loader.
When I try using the advanced setting in the rescue script
to initialize my / partition I alway get an error ( something about high
memory and low memory). If I tell it to try again the module crashes and I
have to reboot. If I use the automatic option I can edit the bootloader
module successfully but I have to go the the whole time consuming process.
 
I've been trying to add a copy of my 'boot_problems' file which contains a
copy of fstab to a floppy to transfer to this machine.
'(none):~#cat /media/floppy/boot_problems' on my unbootable machine shows my
boot_problems file but when I mount that floppy on this machine it is empty
which I would expect the latter since not having write access to the floppy
is why I rebooted in the first place. But I didn't expect the unbootable
machine to show me my file when I run 'cat /media/floppy/boot_problems' even
when there is no floppy loaded in the unbootable machine.!

I don't know what else to do except: (none):~#fsck.reseiserfs --rebuild-tree.
But I don't know if this will make matters better or worse or even work since
fsck.reseirfs --fix-fixable does not. I've run the automatic rescue script
option on the installation disk successfully several times so I'm not
convinced its a file system or a boot loader problem.

Can anyone help me get my system back?
Thanks,
Jerome

ps At the fsck failed login prompt I log in as root, enter init5 and restartx.
I get my GUI back but I don't have access to the web, I get the 'unknown host
error' message. Also the prompt is 'user@(none):~> Instead of
'user@(Mycomputer name):~>. When I open the MyComputer Desktop Icon the
drives:/ folder is empty. I've been to Novell looking for paid support but
the prices start a $500.

Does anyone know what's going on here? Does anyone know how to figure out
what's going on here? Does anyone know how to fix this?

This does not seem to be file system problem according to the rescue script on
the installation dvd. So why is fsck failing at boot? Why does resierfsck
--fix-fixable complain it can't fix the file system because it was mounted
with write permissions? Is it supposed to be unmounted to fix? Why does
mount show two instances of my root partition? How come umount doesn't get
rid of one of them?
Thanks,
Jerome

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