On 23-Jan-11, Brett Parker wrote:
On 22 Jan 23:50, Ted Harding wrote:
Greetings All! I have hit a big snag. On an old machine, I have a hard drive /dev/hda. I had to re-set the machine it when it seized up just now. On re-booting, it went of course into fsck and then announced:
fsck.ext2: No such file or directory while tryin to open /hda1 The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid, and really contains and ext2 filesystem ... then the superblock is corrupt and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device> ... fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To remount it read-write do: ....
At this point, [**] I logged in with the root password, and ran fdisk /dev/hda1, and I got blanks for all the fields. When I ran fdisk /dev/hda, I got Device Begin Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 1 1024 822525248+ 83 Linux Native which looks right.
I then ran the suggested "e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda1" alternative, and it went through the familiar series of checks and asked for approval for the familiar set of corrections. All semed to go well. Then it came boot to the root prompt "#" and, as usual, I pressed Ctrl-D to log out and reboot.
Now, on re-boot, I get the same as before down to [**] above, and this time I do e2fsck /dev/hda1 and this time I get: /dev/hda1: clean, 213963/2058240 files, 3193368/8225248 blocks So it looks as though it succeeded. Now I again do Ctrl-D to reboot. But, on re-boot, I again get exactly the same as first time down to [**] above. So it is as though the superblock has not been fixed (though apparently the alternative superblock was fixed).
SO: QUERY: How can I try to fix the superblock and get it booting normally?
I'm thinking you've already got a fixed superblock, but would be looking at the fstab to check that it has /dev/hda1 not /hda1, the first message saying /hda1 hasn't got a superblock would worry me. I can only assume that you're using an initrd, it may be that the initramfs has a wrong fstab. So, when in the initrd check what the fstab says. If that is wrong, then you're going to need to recreate the initramfs.
Cheers,
Brett Parker http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/
Thanks, Brett. Indeed, the first line in /etc/fstab started:
/hda1 / ...<etc>
and when I edited that so that it started
/dev/hda1 / ...<etc>
all was well! Now to ponder how /etc/fstab got changed like that!
Best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@wlandres.net Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Jan-11 Time: 00:46:48 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------