Hi everybody, I have been running a Fedora Core 1 system for several weeks without problems but since yesterday the machine is kind of broke and I don't know how to proceed (other than reinstalling it). Here's what I know (I don't have access to the machine right now): The system doesn't boot properly. It starts complaining about wrong entries in /etc/rc.d/rcinit and that /dev/null is a read only filesystem (obviously it can't find the root filesystem or any other partition noted in /etc/fstab). Fedora wants me to enter the root password to take maintenance action and repair the filesystem. I looked at /etc/fstab and could not detect anything phony. All the entries were there as usual. Nothing has been changed before the breakdown. Everything went smooth. None of the filesystems in fstab is mounted while logged in as maintenance root and I can't mount them, because apparently my /dev/hdax devices are not there?! I have several partitions (ext3) on /dev/hda, labeled hda1, hda2, hda5 and the swap partition (hda6). I cannot call "e2fsck /dev/hdax" for any of these partitions. I have looked at the manpage but I simply seem to be too stupid to use e2fsck or e2fsck cannot find my partitions either. I do not know what happened to the system. I can only guess. The users told me that the machine did not show the usual GDM login screen but some "ugly other login screen" which they couldn't operate. I guess they were talking about the XFree standard login screen. They then rebooted the system and it stuck like described above. My guess is that maybe the machine has lost power due a electricity problem. But how can this mess up a system that runs on a journaled filesystem? I hope I can rule out hardware failures since the machine is a brand new Dell system. Any help until Sunday is greatly appreciated. If I can't find out what's wrong until then and fix it without data loss, I'll have to use some liveCD like Knoppix to mount the (hopefully existing) partitions and backup them via network and reinstall the machine (with something other than Fedora :-(, probably SuSE 9 or Debian stable). kind regards, Tobias W.
