Re: Power cut off before shutdown

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Linux rebooted and toasted the filesystem on /dev/sda1 (where

Actually it was toast as soon as the CPU halted with file system
changes not yet sync'd.

    Jim> this version of Linux lives. The message is:

    Jim> /dev/sda1: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY

    Jim> I rebooted to my backup on /dev/hda1 and tried to e2fsck the
    Jim> unmounted /dev/sda1, but no go. There's nothing in the man
    Jim> page about doing this manually - neither the -a or -p tags
    Jim> work.

You have to be in "single-user mode."  I have not found a good system
for getting there using LILO flags, and "telinit S" definitely doesn't
work for me in that situation; this may be due to a poor setup in
/etc/rc.d/rc.*, but there it is.  The easiest thing to do is to use
your Slackware installation diskettes, if you've got them, to boot to
the setup system.  Don't run setup, don't mount anything, just run
fsck.

In your case life may be significantly harder since this is the
infamous Peanut Brittle drive, as I recall.  (Given the state of your
file system, I guess you know have a PB&J on toast, huh :-P)  This
means that you must be booting to a kernel that knows how to access
Peanut Brittle drives.  How to arrange that depends on a couple of
things.  If you can mount /dev/sda1 at all, you should be able to copy
the kernel from there to the Slackware boot/install diskette and
re-LILO the diskette.

Life should work out OK once you get fsck to run.

Warning: don't do this when you expect to need to be somewhere else in 
an hour.  You may get lots and lots of messages about deleted inodes
and incorrect reference counts and things like that (this is more
typical of file system overflow crashes, but could happen); fsck
should be told to fix such things.  On the other hand, you probably
don't want to tell it to "fix all", in something that really looks
ugly should come along.  So you have to go through it manually :-(.

You could chance it with autofixing everything.  If you're going to do
that you should think about trying to mount that fs readonly ("mount 
-r -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /tmp_mount_pt") and trying to recover important
data first.  That may be faster and safer than a manual fsck.

Take care....

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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