9.10 won't boot

[Werner Schram]

mlafferty wrote:
>
> A friend just called me to say that her computer running 9.10 hangs up 
> during the boot process. The screen reads:
>
> File system check failed 04E6218B-2809-43AE-BC31-E1893F5CF660
>
> A maintenance shell will now be started
>
> Control – D will terminate this shell and retry
>
> Root at Judy – Desktop;~#
>
It seems that her filesystem is corrupted. You can use the fsck command 
to do an interactive check:
fsck -a UUID=04E6218B-2809-43AE-BC31-E1893F5CF660

You can also look up which partition has the filesystem with the given 
UUID using the blkid command, so you don't have to enter the whole UUID.
The output will look like this:

# blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="2f16191f-62c1-435d-8781-b38dfc9377df" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda2: UUID="YSWwlo-iQD3-JhGy-Vdjr-JU5r-p4jd-do0NeU" TYPE="LVM2_member"

so to check the filesystem with 
UUID=2f16191f-62c1-435d-8781-b38dfc9377df you can type:
fsck -a /dev/sda1

The -a option tells fsck to automatically repair errors. After things 
are repaired, you can press Control-D and continue booting.

You should know that these errors can generally mean two things:
1. the harddisk is failing
2. the computer wasn't shutdown neatly (for example a power failure)

If she is using ubuntu 9.10, she can use the disk utility, to check your 
disks health. The disk utility is found in system->administration->disk 
utility. If the disk is found unhealty by this utility, she should 
consider replacing it, because it can mean that your harddisk could 
become unusable soon. If she is using an older version of ubuntu, she 
can install the smartmontools package and use the smartctl command from 
the command line:

smartctl --test=short /dev/sda
smartctl --all /dev/sda

the output of the smartctl command is a bit hard to read though.

Werner