Thanks to everyone who responded to my posts about my recent crash. I printed out all the posts before launching my latest assault on the problem. This time rather than trying just "fsck" by itself, I followed someone's suggestion and added the path to the problem partition (fsck /dev/hda5) and something constructive seemed to start happening immediately! It said: "unattached inode 2182" and "connect to /lost+found(y)?" and "inode 2182 ref count is 2, should be 1. Fix(y)?" and "deleted/unused inode 10394." "Clear(y)?" ...etc. This went on for a long, long time with many different inodes and I answered yes each time. Finally it said that the partition was clean. I ran the fsck command again to make sure, and it confirmed that it was clean. At this point I rebooted with shutdown -r now. It seemed to boot normally at first, but then the "not cleanly unmounted errors" and "check forced" messages came up again as usual. But after that it booted normally into X. Atleast so I thought. At first I was simply amazed that I was actually looking at X again, until I realized the desktop was awfully clean - no icons! I tried all the menu items as well as the icons on the Kbar - nothing worked. A file manager window had been left open in the taskbar so I opened it, to reveal a blank, white window that refused to close (just like Netscape did just before the disaster occured). I attempted to log out from the K menu (the only menu item that responded), and like before, it locked up everything but the mouse. This time, however, I knew what to do! Crtl+alt+backspace put me back at the logon/off dialog box from where I was able to do a proper reboot. I watched the log out/unmount messages and could see more evidence that things were, basically, still thashed. In angrey red, I briefly caught part of a message that /usr couldnot be unmounted because it was "busy". A few other errors I couldn't catch. Just to make sure none of this wasn't a fluke, I rebooted back into Mandrake and got the same results, including the missing icons, nothing working, and X locking up on shutdown. Just as Anthony said, this has definitely been a big learning experience! I did a little Internet search on the original error messages and found a number of message board posts about it scattered across various Linux forums. I even found it mentioned on a DEC and a Sun site, so it can even happen to the "big boys", although they apparently have fully automated repairing, according to what I read. I do have Mandrake 6.0 so maybe that explains the unmounting problem, as Joseph suggested (any way to upgrade directly off the web?). On one of those other Linux forums someone talked about using e2fsck. Otherwise, I guess it's time to reinstall. Hopefully I can just manage to fix the damage rather than complete start from scratch! See you on the other side!
