fsck freezes after netscape crash

[Cyril Niklaus]

Hi all,
I have a big problem: Netscape (4.72, I think) crashed on me
the other day, badly, forcing me to do a hard reboot. So now
I can't boot any longer. The boot sequence stops during the
fsck check, and sits there for hours (literally, I tried)
doing nothing, in fact freezing the computer. So, having
discovered that the normal boot sequence went nowhere, I
tried with the "single" argument to BootX. Same thing, the
check stops after reporting it has fixed one inode.
I used the linuxppc lite cd I had to boot, in order to get
to a shell to try running fsck with different flags, but I
have the same results, namely that the pc freezes right
after I answer the first question it asks(Deleted inode #
haas zero dtime.Fix?)and I'm once again forced to do a
reset.
What can I do short of reinstalling the whole thing? (which
I really don't want to do, esp with all my data and settings
going down the drain in the process...)
thanks for help!
Cyril

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[Christian Jaeger]

Just an idea: try fsck with some options. You can tell it to use another
super block, for example, may be that helps preventing it from crashing.

But first I would backup your partition - either to another harddisk, or
burn it to CD. You can use 'dd' to copy a partition image 1:1. Or you can
use cat, gzip and cdrecord in a pipe to burn the partition compressed to cd
(that way at least 1 GB will fit on one CD). Just be sure to note the size
of your original partition (use pdisk -l). Ask me if you don't understand
the details. Of course it's a problem if you only have the booting cd,
there won't be cdrecord on it..

Christian.

[Stephen Liu]

Hi Christian,

Re "fsck"

Could you please advise its use. Any pointer/pointers shall be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Stephen