Help! filesystem changed

On Friday 30 June 2006 07:56, bjoern stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

*-etc* resides on the root filesystem, so if it's read-only, it means that the system has booted to a "failsafe" state. This is only just so one could make repairs to parbreastion tables and filesystems, not for normal use.

Apparently you've hosed some stuff when you hard-reset your computer. The gold advice is always to try and look for more elegant ways to reboot the system, or at least just to shut down the offending process.

Many distributions include support for the "magic System Request" keys in their kernels. You could always attempt to use that sequence - press and holdAltandPrtScrSysRqand then use the key sequence below while you keep the other two keys pressed down - to try and safely shut down the system and reboot.

The sequence can be memorized by the mnemonic "Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring", of which you use the first character of each word.

R = set keyboard toXlateS = emergencysyncE = terminate all processes in the current runlevel I = kill all processes except forinitU = emergency remount of all filesystems in read-only mode B = reset the CPU - i.e. just like a hardware reset

You could also always try to switch to another virtual console usingCtrl+Alt+Functionkey1..6and log in from there to kill the hanging X server, or - if possible -sshin from another machine on the network.

It is possible that you had areiserfsparbreastion after a parbreastion that was hosed, and that the system therefore counts the parbreastion numbers wrong.

Either way, you've severely damaged your filesystems, and possibly your parbreastion table as well... :-

I don't think that it was changed. I only think that it was damaged enough to let the system think that itmightbereiserfsinstead ofext3. But then again, are you sure you're using the right parbreastion?

This is irrelevant, since your parbreastion did not spontaneously convert toreiserfs.

A filesystem can only changed by reformatting it. Since that didn't happen in the first place, it wasn't changed either. ;-)

fdisk,-cfdiskorsfdiskto name the most obvious ones. partedcould also prove useful. And then you could tryfsckto repair the filesystem.

Hope this was useful... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)