[7.2] R/W mount of / denied. Filesystem not clean - run fsck.

[Greg Byshenk]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 11:50:11AM +0200, Helmut Schneider wrote:
> Marat N.Afanasyev <amarat at ksu.ru> wrote:
> >Helmut Schneider wrote:

> >>after upgrading a few systems yesterday from 7.1-RELEASE to 7.2-RELEASE 
> >>on one machine I got the error above. The problem was that
> >>
> >>- I was unable to cope with it but booting from a live CD.
> >>- the message appeared ~ 1000 times and then the kernel paniced.
> >>
> >>After fsck'ing / with the help of the live CD I rebooted the machine but 
> >>now I got the same problem with /home.
> >>
> >>How can I avoid such issues (except of not letting the machine crash)? Is 
> >>there a way to boot at least to single user mode and then run fsck (I was 
> >>at home, far away from the machine, not funny)?

> There is no 'login' when / cannot be mounted...
> 
> >fsck it. if you have another machine in there, you can try to make a 
> >serial console. or install a ip-kvm extender ;)
> 
> I do have such thing (IBM Blade Center) but I'm looking for something to 
> avoid the situation above. Something that lets me at least boot into single 
> user mode.

If you had access to the console (I'm guessing you did in order to use the
live CD), did you try booting into single-user from the beastie menu?

IME, failure to fsck the / menu should drop automatically to single-user
at the console, but if this fails, then you should be able to choose
single-user boot from the menu, which will then not try to run fsck or
mount / rw.  From there you should be able to fsck and remount /, as well
as /home or anything else.  This will fail if there is something horribly
wrong with /, causing a failure even when / is mounted ro, but then there
may be no good solution.


-- 
greg byshenk  -  gbyshenk at byshenk.net  -  Leiden, NL