I have a RedHat 7.3 machine that evidently "hung" over the weekend and
another person couldn't get it to respond so they hard rebooted it.  Now
it is unable to boot, it detects that the filesystem needs to be
checked, starts up the journal (the file system is ext3), tries to put
the file system in read-write and then hangs.
The last output given before it stalls is:

Mounting root filesystem
EXT3-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem
EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
Kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: ide0(3,2): orphan cleanup on readonly fs

I have tried using the distro rescue, it fires up on the cd and then
prompts me with the following:

The rescue environment will now attempt to find your Red Hat
Linux installation and mount it under the directory
/mnt/sysimage.  You can then make any changes required to your
system.  If you want to proceed with this step choose
'Continue'. You can also choose to mount your filesystem 
read-only instead of read-write by choosing 'Read-only'.
If for some reason this process fails you can choose 'Skip' 
and this step will be skipped and you will go directly to a
command shell.

Choosing either Continue or Read-Only hangs. Skipping does go to a
command shell but with nothing mounted.

I figure that the problem is one of three things:
1: The file system is shot because of hard drive failure.
2: File system is unrecoverable.
3: File system can be repaired.

I am having a difficult time trying to determine if the failure is
hardware or software.  I thought that if it was software, then the
rescue CD would discover it.  That leads me to think it is hardware.
But, then again, the MBR is clearly intact, although that does not give
any assurance a sector or two has not been damaged.  

I thought that I would see if anyone had any ideas.  I am downloading
Knoppix presently as I hope that it can shed some light on the
situation.

Regards,
Devlin


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