Ext3 users - Jan 2002 - Recovery

I've been running RH 72 on my Dell at work. Since I
use more than one system and I test things, I forgot
that I had the root partition as ext3. That machine
has two kernels on it. One is the stock 2.4.7 RH 72
and the other is the new 2.4.17 that I compiled last
week.

This morning I logged in and typed startx. The kernel
responed by coughing up a lung and segfaulted.
Couldn't run any command on it, not even su. Had no
choice but to hit the reset button.

When the system tried to come up, it couldnt mount
root. It dropped me straight into single user mode. No
problem, I thought to myself. See, I am scheduled to
take my RHCE on the 25th and been practicing reviving
sick filesystems. The first command I ran was
fsck.ext2 /dev/hda5. It complained that it couldn't
run. I figured that the superblock must have been
corrupt. I ran debugfs /dev/hda5 to see the listing of
superblocks. Then I typed fsck.ext2 -b 32768 /dev/hda5
and it found a bunch of errors that it said it fixed.
Great, me thinks. I'll reboot and be back in business!

Nope. Upon rebooting, it dropped me again in single
user mode. Still it couldn't mount root. At this point
I knew I was in trouble. Either it was badly damaged,
or I am definitely not ready to take the test. I
rebooted the system into rescue mode from the CD. I
cat /proc/mounts to see what is there. It was at this
point that I realized that root was ext3. I ran
tune2fs -l /dev/hda5 to double check, and sure enough
it said has_journal among others.

Well, I was out of ideas. I forced fsck.ext2 with
another superblock, and the system turned out to be
clean. Rebooted, same story, dumped me into single
user. At this point my busy day started and couldn't
attend to my own system all day.

Tomorrow I'll give it another shot, if I come up with
any worthwile ideas.

Is it all right to run fsck.ext2 on a journaled
filesystem?

Did I do something really stupid?

Did I not do something I should have?

Am I ready for the test?

-Frustrated-

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begin  Linux Pquter quotation:
> When the system tried to come up, it couldnt mount root. It dropped
> me straight into single user mode.
I'm not familiar with the newer versions of Red Hat, but how on Earth
did you get into single-user mode if you could not mount the root
filesystem?  Perhaps the message said it could not *fsck* root?

-- 
 /////////////////  |                  | The spark of a pin
<sneakums@zork.net> |  (require 'gnu)  | dropping, falling
feather-like.
 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\  |                  | There is too much noise.

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 07:24:15PM -0800, Linux Pquter wrote:
> When the system tried to come up, it couldnt mount
> root. It dropped me straight into single user mode.
It _did_ mount root, otherwise you could not be in single user mode.
What errors did you get, when, exactly?  If you mount /proc, what does
/proc/mounts show?

Cheers,
 Stephen

>begin  Linux Pquter quotation:
>
>> When the system tried to come up, it couldnt mount 
>> root. It dropped me straight into single user mode.
>
>I'm not familiar with the newer versions of Red Hat,
>but how on Earth did you get into single-user mode if
>you could not mount the root filesystem?  Perhaps the
>message said it could not *fsck* root?
I meant it couldn't mount root rw.

-Mike

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