correcting hard errors on IDE drive

[John]

Hello list

The system giving these errors is in a data centre. I got mailed this in my
daily system log:

> ad0s1f: hard error reading fsbn 266219 (ad0s1 bn 266219; cn 16 tn 145 sn 44)
status=59 error=40
> ad0s1f: hard error reading fsbn 110559243 of 266214-266233 (ad0s1 bn
110559243; cn 6881 tn 253 sn 39) status=59 error=40
> ad0s1f: hard error reading fsbn 266219 (ad0s1 bn 266219; cn 16 tn 145 sn 44)
status=59 error=40
> ad0s1f: hard error reading fsbn 110559231 of 266208-266221 (ad0s1 bn
110559231; cn 6881 tn 253 sn 27) status=59 error=40

This is an IDE drive, btw.

that's all there was. I know I need to run fsck on that partition, the problem
is I need to do it remotely, and that partition is in fact /var/log so there's
a lot of processes writing to it. I can stop the various daemons running on
the server and restart them if need be. The question is, how can I remain at
an interactive root login whilst taking the system down to a level so I can
umount /var/log without having to visit the datacentre? 

I don't think the system will come up in a state where I can ssh into it if I
just uncomment /var/log in /etc/fstab

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