9.10 won't boot

[Leonard Chatagnier]

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;~#
>
> Control D does not correct the problem. This error has occurred once
> before and was fixed by someone in her town that knows a lot more about
> Ubuntu than I do. He is out of the country for a couple of weeks.
>
> Help!
>
> Russell M. Lafferty
>
You can try this:
1. Boot up in recovery mode: the second selection down on the grub boot 
screen.
2. There should be a selection to run fsck on the recovery menu; if so
run it, let it complete fully and when the recovery screen comes back
select normal boot.
3. If the recovery screen doesn't have a fsck selection then go to a
root terminal(there is one in Karmic) and first run:
umount -a  to unmount everything then run:
fsck -pv /dev/sdxx  where the first x is the drive(sda, sdb or the like) 
in question and the
second x is the partition number.  The command will automaticall repair
the drive that can safely be repaired and will print out details for
things it cannot safely repair for administrative use.  The v will give
you verbose output so you can better tell what is going on.
Warning; using fsck can mess up a drive causing you to have to 
repartition and reinstall.  Has happened to me before and to others;
however; it wont physically hurt the drive and nothing else to do
anyway except to partition and install again.
Warning2: if you see any message saying the drive is still mounted do
not proceed until you unmount the drive or the file system will surely
be messed up.
HTH,
-- 
Leonard
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net