I have an HP 2133 mini-laptop (owned by a friend) which has a 5 GB solid-state hard drive and came preinstalled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 10.1-0.
When she boots, it displays the following…
Loading scsi_mod
Loading sd_mod
Loading libata
Loading sata_via
Loading rciserfs
Loading jbd
Loading ext3
Waiting for device /dev/sda2 to appear: ok
rootfs: major=8 minor=2 devn=2050
fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
[/bin/fsck.ext3 (1) – /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/dev/sda2: Directory inode 195405, block 0, offset 0: directroy corrupted
/dev/sda2: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
fsck.ext3 /dev/sda2 failed (status 0x4). Run manually!
fsck failed. Mounting root device read-only.
It goes on to attempt to mount the file system and repeat fsck, which again fails. The last entry on the screen is:
Give root password for login:
I don’t know the root password. I have tried several choices to reboot in single-user mode, which other forums have indicated would bypass this password prompt – without success.
I assume that, if I could actually get to a Linux command prompt, fsck could be used to correct/discard the bad directory structures, but I can’t seem to get there.
The owner does not care if I reload the OS clean, but this box does not have a CD or DVD drive. I considered booting from an external CD drive or a thumbdrive, but the boot options appear to be either the harddrive or network.
Suggestions? By the way, although I hold a BS in computer science and have written very low-level code for other platforms, I’m a newbie on Linux, so I will ask for your patience if I don’t understand your first answers.
Hi
Just enter the user name as root when it asks for the password hit
enter and you will be at the prompt. Then run the command as instructed
fsck.ext3 /dev/sda2
You know what I’ve done in the past - sometimes you get this error if there’s just a wrong entry in fstab - like if you’ve changed the partition setup - anyway, a Knoppix CD/DVD is very useful and you can boot the system and edit fstab (or whatever). If it is a problem that you need fsck for, then I’ve used a GParted CD. It boots into GParted under some window system, and you can check all the filesystems (except a “non-cleanly-shut-down” NTFS disk).
For me, the nice thing about both of these approaches is the GUIs - I have never done command-line linux.
I have been able to get through the password issues and run fsck. It put several directories into the lost+found directory, which I think I should sort through, but rebooting the system now brings it to the GUI and I’m able to browse the Internet. And that’s what the owner really wants to do.