Ok, lets go step by step to what happened and what you should have done, and
what you need to do. Most of it isnt' really Mandrakes fault really.
> I think I may finally be ready to throw in the towel on Linux. Everything
> is gone, and I wasn't even doing a damn thing other than browsing with
> Netscape. One 2nd everything was great, then for no apparent reason the
> browser went blank - nothing but a white screen - and it wouldn't close.
That's because Netscape sucks really hard.
So
> I went to use the Kill tool on it, but I couldn't because all the desktop
> icons had disappeared, leaving only black outlines of where they would
> normally be. I still wasn't overly concerned because this happens from time
> to time anyway. I tried to shutdown, but the shutdown message just came up
> and froze, along with everything else except the mouse.
This also happens every once in a while. To get rid of it, hit
ctrl+alt+backspace. That will kill X and bring you back to the login prompt.
>So I manually
> rebooted.
VERY bad idea. Never ever reboot manually unless you absoluty positivily cannot
do it from Linux. (which has only happned to me 3 times in the 9 months I've
been using Linux). Of course, since you didn't know how to do it from Linux,
then in your eyes you couldn't do it, hence rebooting manually was justified in
your case.
>The "not cleanly unmounted" errors came up, as they have been
> every time for the past couple months - it usually seems to just delay the
> boot process slightly. But then something different popped up:
> "/dev/hda5 contains a file system with errors, check forced. /dev/hda5:
> inode 43199 has illegal block(s)" and then:
> "/dev/hda5: Unexpected Inconsistency: run fsck manually (without -a or -p
> options)". Then in red, it says "[FAILED]", followed by: "An error occurred
> during the file system check dropping you to a shell. The system will
> reboot when you leave the shell. Give root password for maintenance or
> ctrl-D for normal startup".
That's what happens when the gods get displeased at you rebooting manually and
decide to make you suffer. Or in a more accurate since, the manual reboot
screwed up your file system, and you're supposed to use fsck to fix it.
So I entered the root password, and it said,
> "BASH: ID: command not found". It repeated that bash message for about 5 or
> 6 lines. I tried the fsck, and then it said: "Parallelizing fsck version
> 1.14...".
That is not a good sign. When you enter the root password it's supposed to drop
you into a command prompt so you can run fsck.
>
> I manually rebooted again, got the same results. Another time I tried the
> ctrl-D but it just rebooted back into the same thing. When it rebooted I
> saw something about "..cannot unlink..." and "..var/unlock file.." but it
> scrolled too fast to make out the whole message.
I'm not sure what you should do know. My best advice is just go ahead and
reinstall.
>
> It took a lot of time and effort over several months to get things to
> finally work right, and I still had work left to do. I had previously
> experimented with Slackware, which took forever just to get the basics
> setup, but then a couple of unexpected severe crashes requiring
> reinstallation finally sent me back out in search of something better.
> Mandrake seemed to be it, but this latest disaster has me pretty bummed
> with the whole thing. It seems like, although Linux may not crash everytime
> you turn around, the way Windows does, eventually it is going to crash, and
> crash HARD, and not necessarily for any obvious good reason.
Once a journaling file system gets implemented into Linux, many of the
filesystem problems should diminish. Then simply rebooting your machine won't
toally screw it up like it did to yours. But intill then, Linux has to be
pampered a little bit.
>It's after 1
> AM and I've been struggling with this for several hours, so maybe I'll feel
> different tomorrow and do another reinstall if I have to. But right now I'm
> thinking maybe I might just look for some other OS, maybe FreeBSD or
> something. Don't get me wrong - Mandrake has been great, and it's
> definitely the best distribution of the 3 I've tried, but it just seems
> like there's some inherent unstableness of a different kind lurking in
> Linux in general. Maybe I've just been having a string of bad luck. I may
> still be a 'newbie' but this one came completely out of left field. The
> worst part of it - I was just about ready to start spending most of my time
> in Linux. I had just downloaded (not installed) a program that could do
> what one of my primary windows programs does, and I had just downloaded
> VMware (also not installed yet). But now here I am back in Windows full
> time it looks like. I can almost hear Bill laughing :-(
Look at it this way. Now you know what do if it ever happens again. And you
already know many of the things you need to do, so reinstallation and
configuring won't take near as long as it did the first time. You just got
unlucky. Chalk it up as a learning experiance. And don't give up on Linux, it
really is a great OS.
--
Anthony Huereca
http://m3000.1wh.com
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
