e2fsck error for /dev/boot

Samuel · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 11 Location: MPLS, MN

I moved this past weekend, and when I fired up my gentoo box it gives me an error that /MNT/BOOT is not a valid ext2 partition. It says, "You might want to run e2fsck -b 8193 <device>". Then it says "if /mnt/boot is an ext2 partition it is probably corrupted." Says that it needs manual configuration. Well, everything was totally fine before I moved. The only thing I did to the box before I got the error was to remove a 2nd HDD. That HDD was not being used, though, and I don't think it was configured to mount on startup.

It gives me the option of entering the password for maintenance or hitting ctrl-d for normal boot. If I try to boot normally there are all sorts of problems loading X and gnome... If I boot into maintenance I get a command line but, unfortunately, i don't know what to do. I ran e2fsck as suggested in the error, but that simply repeats the error.

Any ideas??

Sam

Lajasha · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 1:45 am Post subject:

If the only thing you changed was removing that HDD you may wanna try putting it back and see what happens...

Other than this, can you post your /etc/fstab and you may wanna run fdisk tomake sure all your partitions are there.
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Samuel · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 11 Location: MPLS, MN

Thanks for the quick reply. I just put back that HDD, to no avail. Still get the exact same error. I ran fdisk on hda and all the partitions are there as I set them up.... the gentoo box is stand alone right now and not hooked up to anything, so I can't copy the /etc/fstab exactly, but here is most of it... I'm leaving out the cdrom bit

/dev/BOOT /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/ROOT / xfs noatime 0 0
/dev/SWAP none swap sw 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

I did not knowingly ever make changes to this file since I did the install.

Thanks,

Sam

Lajasha · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:12 am Post subject:

Ok your problem is right here most likely:

Samuel · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 11 Location: MPLS, MN

OK, now I'm pretty confused. What you suggest is what it was when I set it up -- how might it have been changed? So, when I change /etc/fstab back to what it should be, I do not get the full-blown error that I got before, and it _seems_ to boot OK. But, it does still give the first part of the error. That is "fsck.xfs not found for dev/hda3/'' and, "fsck.ext2 not found for dev/hda2" -- before I made the change to /etc/fstab it read "dev/ROOT and /dev/BOOT" instead... And here's the weird thing, when it loads GDM the basic X is all that comes up -- no gnome, just X...

Thanks for your help!

hmmm... i thinking a little more, I suppose I must have emerged something and not updated the config files? I will go through everything I might have emerged and re-consult the install documentation to see which config settings I may have borked...

Sam

Lajasha · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:30 am Post subject:

You probly did an "emerge -u world" or something similar and it downloaded and installed the baselayout package which you then told to go ahead and let it update which then blew away your old files. How ever do you know what file system you used for the partitions? ext2,ext3,reiserfs,xfs, etc?

The reason I ask is it looks like it can not find the files needed to fsck your partitions and generaly this is because you were never using those filesystems to begin with. You can try changing the ext2 and xfs to ext3 and see if that works but that would imply that you are using an ext3 filesystem to begin with.
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Samuel · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 11 Location: MPLS, MN

interesting... i followed the gentoo documentation pretty precisely while doing the install. I used ext3 for everything except the swap space, IIRC, which was ext2 -- I will change those as well.

Thanks.

Lajasha · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:34 am Post subject:

The swap line is fine except the /dev/SWAP.
Given what you said yours should be like so:

Samuel · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 11 Location: MPLS, MN

OK, yes -- I had made notes of what my fstab was, and I changed it back to its original state -- just like you posted below, except for a couple of those numbers at the end.

So, this problem is fixed! Now... I jus have to figure out what got screwed up with X...

Thanks a lot. i'm learning a major lesson here -- thanks for being so nice to such a n00b.

Sam

Lajasha · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:42 am Post subject:

Np, I love to help. You may wanna run through the desktop setup here that way you are sure it is correct as those config files could have been blown away too.
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rmrossjr · n00b Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

I made a similar mistake setting up fstab. However, I have tried to edit the file and cannot save the changes - read only. Is there a way to work around this or do I have to proceed to re-install?
Thanks