fsck boot sequence failure SL 6.1

[Yasha Karant]

My wife did not notice that her laptop was unplugged, and ran the 
machine until it quit for lack of power.  Running SL 6.1 IA-32, current 
production SL kernel (not elrepo, etc.).  On the reboot with improperly 
unmounted partitions, the auto fsck failed, and gave the usual enter 
root password or ctrl-D prompt to run fsck manually.  When this 
happened, rather than accept the full root password, after the first few 
characters, the enter prompt re-appeared, and would never let me get to 
a shell.  I finally had to put the install DVD that has the rescue 
option into the DVD drive and boot from the DVD, and used fsck -y under 
rescue to fsck the partitions from ls /dev/sd*.  The system then 
rebooted.  What is wrong?  What do I need to change?

Yasha Karant