8.10 on an Inspiron 1420; fsck fails

[WiseMaturin]

On startup the computer displays "blahblahblah unclean shutdown, checking drives".

All well and good, but it gets to 64% and then it displays command line looking info, and eventually says something like "fsck failed, must run it manually"

I've tried several times to do this, and was told to enter yes to everything that comes up, but eventually it starts all over and it NEVER finishes, so I have to either ctrl + D to resume startup, which it does fine and there are no problems when ubuntu starts nor while it is running, but it takes 10 minutes to start because of this.


Why?

[coffeeaddict22]

Hi,
That "command line looking info" is your key. run the file check in a terminal-fsck is the command you want, and post the output back.

[WiseMaturin]

/dev/sda7: unexpected inconsistency; run fsck manually
fsck died with exit status 4

File system check failed
A log is being saved in /var/log/fask/checkfs
Please repair the file system manually

And there was something after it about a command shell opening and to push ctrl + D to resume normal boot, but it didn't seem relevant so I left that part out.

[coffeeaddict22]

OK, so what's the output of the log? type in cat /var/log/fask/checkfs |less and see if you can spot what the issue is, or post it back (I'm curious...). You could also look in etc/fstab and see what filesystem is causing the problem- if it's mounted (which sounds correct) mount or for the slightly messier but occasionally more complete version cat /etc/fstab

[WiseMaturin]

Log of fsck -C3 -R -A -a
Sat May 23 05:01:55 2009

fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
/dev/sda7 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/dev/sda7: Inode 1572103 has EXTENTS_FL flag set on filesystem without extents support.


/dev/sda7: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck died with exit status 4

Sat May 23 05:04:16 2009


and the result of cat /etc/fstab


wise@wise-ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda5
UUID=561ec7d3-3ac5-4925-a00c-aad12b3da412 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda7
UUID=dd652d11-8d8b-461c-b4ba-5603e44ad0e8 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# /dev/sda6
UUID=9ae1dace-a15f-46ea-9732-55cfc422720d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

[coffeeaddict22]

The extents flag should be OK with an ext3 filesystem. It's your home folder, so I hope you're backed up...
Simplest option would be to back it up, reformat the partition and then go for it. Have you changed the partition format recently?

[WiseMaturin]

The most recent partitioning I did was when I reinstalled Ubuntu because I had to reinstall Vista as well. But Vista is constantly failing, and just taking up harddrive space, so I guess just reinstalling is no big deal.

So the easiest solution is to back up my home folder?
So if /home is a different partition, is there a different way of going about that?

[Boondoklife]

The most recent partitioning I did was when I reinstalled Ubuntu because I had to reinstall Vista as well. But Vista is constantly failing, and just taking up harddrive space, so I guess just reinstalling is no big deal.

So the easiest solution is to back up my home folder?
So if /home is a different partition, is there a different way of going about that?

Easiest way of backing up your home folder is going to be boot from the ubuntu cd and use the try ubuntu feature.

This will load you up to a working OS. then from there mount the partition /home is on, looks like /dev/sda7.mkdir /mnt/temphome
mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/temphomeThen from here you will need to copy the data to another drive or burn it to a disk.