Aloha Everyone

I am running mandriva 2008 on my laptop, and yesterday if refused to boot. It has been acting weird lately. I have been having trouble changing permissions on files, and putting music onto my ipod.

Yesterday it gave me this while trying to boot:

fsck.ext3: no such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda5
/dev/sda5:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If device is valid and it really contains ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

/dev/hda6: clean, 116703/10682368 files, 20717953/21352385 [failed]

*** An error occured during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):


Anybody know what I should do now?


[moved from Software by spinynorman]

My guess is that you have a failing hard drive. You will probably need to replace it. You can try running TestDisk and see what it comes up with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

Is there anything I can do in the shell it gives me?

Yes run:

So I downloaded a test program for my harddrive, it said it was OK, I testing my ram right now. When it is done I will try "e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda6"

@kilimanjaro: Please check my post again, I have edited it to show the correct drive.

If running e2fsck doesn't help you could try using a rescue cd to make repairs: http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=2&front_id=1

I think you need to run it on /dev/sda5 rather than /dev/hda6. Although it does look like you have a minor issue on /dev/hda6 though.

So I ran it on sda5 and hda6 and got the same response.

Have you done this?



since /dev/sda5 was mentioning a bad superblock? And what were the results after running it? What did it say?

Also, what is the filesystem on /dev/sda5? Are you sure it's ext2 and not ext3? Or something else? Perhaps the config in /etc/fstab is badly configured because I've had errors generated before when it was listed wrong in /etc/fstab.

Aloha Ian

So the response I got was:

"The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>"

I tried it with both sda5 and hda6. I'm not sure what ext2 and ext3 are, so I don't know what it should be.

ext2 and ext3 are similar, except ext3 has journaling whereas ext2 does not. Can you post/check the contents of /etc/fstab so we can see what your filesystem types are meant to be for these particular partitions.

How do I view the fstab from a shell?

or, if you want to edit it directly,

I wonder if there is a bug somewhere because I had a similar failure with mandriva a while back (during cooker 2008.1). I tried to get the filesystem going again but it was just too much work. Ubuntu detected no filesytem errors and could read everything just fine, so I backed up my files and whiped to disk and reinstalled.Reinstalling took me far less time than trying to figure out how to recover....