In trouble with broken filesystem

Last night when I tried to shut down my laptop it wouldn’t shut down. When I clicked the shutdown icon the screen would just grey but no confirmation prompt to shutdown as would normally come up. In the end I had to just force it off by pressing and holding the power button as my battery was about to die anyway.

Now when I try boot I get an error saying that there is a problem with the filesystem (not /) and that I need to manually repair it. I’m presented with the command line root login prompt. When logging in I am I then get a filesystem repair prompt. What do I do from here?

Is there a general disk / filesystem repair utility that I can run from this prompt? It’s not obvious which partition is the problem although it does say not /.

Sorry, should have said I’m using ext3 filesystem.

OK, I managed to fix it. It was a USB drive that was left mounted in the fstab. I just removed the entry from fstab and it booted fine after that. So now I can work on fixing the entry in fstab and restoring the usb drive.

fsck it then :wink: