Urgent: System complains about /etc/rc.d/rcinit and can't mount fstab entries

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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.




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