Hi all-
I've managed to install the base system via floppies and I've spent
several hours downloading packaged with dselect, and all seemed to
be progressing nicely. I've only rebooted the system twice, and
after downloading and installing something to do with the libc5
libraries, dselect instructed me to reboot when it was finished. So
after everything was installed and configured, I rebooted the
machine with Ctrl-Alt-Del, but I didn't stop to think if that's okay
with Debian (it's posed no problem with any other dist that I've
installed), so the system rebooted and when fsck started to check my
filesystems it barfed up the following:
---Begin fsck message---
Couldn't find ext2 super-block while trying to open /dev/hda
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the
superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an
alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. Please note that the
root filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To remount it
read-write:
#mount -n -o remount,rw /
---End fsck message ---
I entered my root password and typed e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda1 at the
prompt. fsck ran and asked me to fix a few things, and exited
without any error messages. I rebooted (this time with shutdown -r
now) and was presented with the same error message. I tried again,
this time mounting the root filesystem read-write as mentioned
above, but then fsck complained that the system was mounted and
asked me if it should continue. Not sure of the consequences, I
declined.
The only thing that I can think of that affected the mounting of
filesystems was I edited the /etc/fstab to include my cdrom,
cdwriter, and floppy drive. I cleaned it up a little as it was
"ugly", but I didn't modify any of the info on lines already present
execept to format them nicer with tabs.
I've never been presented with an error like this before, so I don't
know what to do or where to look. I can't even bring up a man page
on e2fsck.
Am I screwed, or is there a solution to my dilemna? I would surely
be disappointed if I had to trash everything I had accomplished up
to this point. Heck I was proud of myself, because last year I
couldn't figure out dselect!
Thanks for any help,
Mark
