repairing fsck

[WireChief]

I have Linux Suse 7.1 was trying to setup Kmail and while reading the helpfile index it locked up. nothing worked Ctrl Alt backspace, nothing worked. did a power down reset.. yep know your not suppose to but did. now its broke. On bootup it says fsck.ext2 failed and I need to run it manually, how do you do that?

[paradox]

easy question there...

just type fsck from the bash prompt

if that doesn't do it....type

fsck /dev/hdax

x being the number of your drive if it is hda1 2 or 3

[jman_77]

Actually, a better way to do that is to boot to a disk, either floppy or cd-rom. Running fsck on mounted partitions is bad

so, boot to a disk and fsck /dev/hda1 for example
let us know if you're not sure how to find your device identifier. It's always /dev/hd--

[WireChief]

Gulp :'( I dont remember what i did... I know I rebooted followed the instructions on the screen typed fsck.ext2 /dev/hdh3 and answered yes to all the questions i didnt understand, rebooted using Ctrl D and Whew! the Linux screen popped back up! I got a message saying that Khot keys caused signal 11 SIGSEGV and to report this. Duh where do i report this.. :-/

[paradox]

If it continues to say that each time, report it to the kernel.org site...see what they have to say.....it prolly won't happen again, if it does my guess would be a bad harddrive sector...

[WireChief]

Yep it happened again, this time i was just minding my own business, I mean I went into Kmail ...configuration....and was about to change an option and Bang! got grabbed by the throat and couldnt do anything but wait...then I hit reset and prayed, this time it come back ok none of the bug bomb error reporting that I got the first time. Since all this I have gotten the mainual out scoured for help (found none) checked the user help files on the net (no help) then back to configuration again and determined to get it this time I changed the configuration from sendmail to SMPT and the localhost to my ISP's mail id..oh yeah also went back to the recieve mail section and added my userid and password and changed the IP address to my isps mail id selected OK and then watched all the mail come in!! then tried to send mail,, and watched all my previously held mail go out! Yippie! I did it!!! then set the option to check mail every 2 minutes and now am not being disconnected after a short time... YES!!! oh man Im good!! ha ha gotta pat meself on the back eh? hope all this helps someone else trying to get things working..
gotta write it up in a journal and make it available.

[paradox]

I'd love to see a journal of what is going on. I am glad you got it to work, it feels good getting Linux to work for you the way it is supposed to eh? ;D Well, I told you the learning curve is rough, but your getting to the smoother section of the curve, so things will start becoming a bit clearer for you now!

[malexg]

A couple of things job my mind when I read this:

1) When you hit the reset button, you cause the OS to unmount the harddrive before stuff in memory can be wrote to it, and thus you can possibly damage the file-system

2) My experience is that fsck fixes everything, but I have also noted that things don't always work right. In particular, my route table doesn't get loaded correctly, and I cannot access the outside network (outside my ISP's local network). I tend to do a warm reboot after the machine comes up from a hard reset.


3) You won't be able to send/receive mail DIRECTLY from your machine if you don't have a fixed IP and have configured sendmail (or another mail server) to send-receive email. You can configure sendmail from YaST, and it's very easy.

Yep it happened again, this time i was just minding my own.<SNIP>