[wellylug] Repairing Ubuntu

[Mark Foster]

On Sat, 18 Jul 2009, John Durham wrote:

> Jethro Carr wrote:
>> On Sat, 2009-07-18 at 14:34 +1200, John Durham wrote:
>>> Well, let's just add that the system no longer boots from the hard
>>> drive, so the live CD became the only alternative.
>>> Even then it tried and failed repeatedly to boot from CD.
>>> This machine has been fine for a long time. Now it is acting like a
>>> retirement case. The hard drive light is active on power up, but nothing
>>> starts. After that it sits there and consumes power.
>>
>> ok, that's a bit more useful. :-)
>>
>> Do you manage to boot to the grub boot loader? Are you able to start
>> Linux at all?
> Found a 20GB drive and installed it. The drive already had a copy of
> Xubuntu on it so there were some off messages on boot.
> Looks like I need to reinstall to account for the change of hardware.

Xubuntu is usually pretty good at detecting new hardware. Depends on the 
nature of the messages.


>> If it's suddenly not even getting to the grub boot loader, then I'd
>> suspect a hardware failure of your server.
> You were right about the server area. That is now no more. Let's hope it
> responds well to  a re-install.
> On the server side, that is out of my area so I'll need personal help
> from a server man. Thankfully the main web server next to it was not
> affected.
>
> On boot the system gave some interesting messages.
> "fsck died with exit status 4"
> A manual fsck should be performed in maintenance mode with the root file
> system in read only mode.
> What can you tell me about this please?

You pretty much need to do what it says. fsck is the equivalent of 
'scandisk' and is used to repair errors within the filesystem.  Get a 
command prompt, ensure you're root, and run fsck on the specified 
partition.  It'll either work and sort you out - or your problems are 
significant enough to warrant a good hard look at your system.

I may be able to help, just need to get to grips with what you're trying 
to achieve.  A from-scratch approach will probably help clear up alot of 
your woes.

Mark.