Hello I have a bit of a problem. X had just basically froze on my notebook and their was no other option than to hit the power button. Now while booting fsck wont go past 64% just hangs then the tries to continue the boot process. It appears either to be the / partition or /var (as I have this partitioned also) Im not really sure as it doesnt get very far.
The thing is Im on travel atm and have no way of downloading a live CD atm. Is their any way with some grub flags or something that I can get this booted to manually execute fsck ?
Any ideas would be a great help. (Failsafe wont boot either, same thing)
If fsck stalls you may have bad blocks on the disk which might also be the cause of the initial crash. You may have a brick until you get home. If you have valuable data on it, better not try to power it up any more or you may make it worse. Sorry for the bad prognosis.
thanks for the quick reply. I had pretty much thought the same. Although I do have all the important stuff backed up to a usb drive so I thought no pain no gain.
Finally after letting it try and boot (took forever) finally got it into rescue mode, and / mounted read only. It was / that was damaged. fsck basically said their were bad blocks and unallocate inodes and asked to delete them, so I chose yes, after the check which also took forever, rebooted and it seems everything is working. Dont quite know what the repurcusions are but will probably do a reinstall when possible. At least the OS seems for the most part functional.
When you get home you could run smartmontools to check the internal error log in the drive. If it shows a significant number of bad blocks in the stats, better to replace the disk than to risk your data, as large numbers of bad blocks are a precursor to failure. On the other hand it could be that some directory structures got corrupted by the sudden power off and there are actually no bad blocks.