Arch Linux

kandrews

Member

Registered: 2007-04-21

Posts: 119

filesystem check failed

Hi,

When I booted up this morning I got a "FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED" for the first time. I searched the forums and found http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=27984 this thread but the OP's problem resolved itself. I am ignorant of how runlevels work and I am deftly affraid of losing this filesystem because I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to make backups yet and I have been using the computer for taking my class notes (I just installed Arch on this laptop a week ago).

On that thread, the helpful people were adamant that the filesystem shouldn't be mounted.
When I run the command "mount", I get:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type ramfs (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs

/dev/sda3 is my main file system.

How can I get to a safe runlevel to run the

e2fsck -p /dev/sda3

command? Will it be ok directly from the root@(none) prompt? I couldn't find a wiki page for general filesystem recovery. Are there any man pages are websites that you can recommend to help me learn more about run-levels and recovering broken file systems?

Thanks a bunch!

ataraxia

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2007-05-06

Posts: 1,553

Re: filesystem check failed

While booting, use the GRUB menus to add "single" to the end of the kernel's command line. This will bring the machine up in such a state that you can fsck the root FS. (Yours isn't safe as shown above since it says "rw", when it says "ro" it's ok)

When you do fsck, don't use the "-p" flag, that's only for very cursory checks like the system runs at boot (and which just failed for you). You want to do a full fsck, so no flags.

Mikko777

Member

From: Suomi, Finland

Registered: 2006-10-30

Posts: 837

Re: filesystem check failed

Well this is the only way i've managed to ruin my arch installation....

I thought when it said that errors found, mounted as readonly... that i needed to mount it read write before I could fix the errors...

Well that pretty much killed that partition

So when it says errors found, want to boot into maintenance mode answer yes, then dont mount anything and run
ex. fsck.ext3 -y /dev/sda....

That seems to be harmless atleast after 3 tries.

---

Planet KDE | Opendesktop.org | Chakra Project