boot with dirty filesystem?

[Fred Condo]

On Friday, Aug 8, 2003, at 07:49 US/Pacific, 
doug at allensystemconsultants.com wrote:

> I have a small problem.  I've had a machine go down and it came back
> up with dirty filesystem on /var and /usr.  fsck has solved the
> problem with /var, after 10 times through.  fsck seems unable to
> resolve the inconsistencies with /usr however.  fsck is running for
> the 15th time right now.  It looks to me like a probable bad sector on
> the disk.
>
> My question is there a way to force the machine to boot with a dirty
> filesystem, so that I can pull data from /etc to move to a new disk?
> Barring that, is there still a procedure to force the system to boot,
> update the inodes with whatever information it can find, and mark the
> other files as unreadable?

You don't need to mount /usr to copy /etc. Boot the system single-user. 
Mount a floppy on /mnt. cp -R /etc /mnt. Halt the system and pull the 
floppy.