Indigo Renderer Forum

hello all

my HD recently messed up due to a forced shutdown and a damaged filesystem, so im gonna have to re-install mandriva on my laptop. my system will not boot, does anyone know if i can save any of my v. important files? if i do a re-install without backing up my files in the /home directory, is it definate that i will loose everything? or will it be saved? (like windows does if you have to re-install, by creating a file called windows.old)
I have vista installed on a different partition, is there any way i can transfer stuff from my home folder into the vista partition? the system doesnt get past the booting stage, but if i press esc during boot up, i enter verbose mode, so i can type any commands there.

any replies are much appreciated, and a very well done if u understood what i just said, coz i seem to have complicating things down to a fine art now lol.

Can you boot a live CD and run fsck on your HD ?

im not sure, i dont know a lot about linux, could you explain what that means and how i do it? also, here's the actual error message i get when i try to boot if this helps anything

setting hostname homewireless: [ok]
setting up logical volume management: no volume groups found
[ok]

cheking root filesystem
/dev/sda5 contains a filesystem with errors, check forced
Error reading block 33150 (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while getting next inode from scan

/dev/sda5: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck manually. (i.e. without -a or -p options)

***An error occoured during filesystem check.
***Dropping you into a shell.

enter root password for maintenence or press Control+D to continue

OK, so can you enter the root pasword to get into a shell.


Then you need to run This is the equivalent of windows chkdsk, with the added bonus that it's better

ok thanks! will this completely solve the problem?

Depends if fsck can repair the disk.
Either way, you probably still need to think of a way to backup your data.

ok. do you know of any ways to back up data when the system doesnt boot? is there any way i can use things like the ch, ls and mv commands to move stuff to my vista partition? also, a website about this problem says to run e2fsck, so which one do i do? do i run fsck /dev/sda5 or do i run e2fsck??

as far as i know e2fsck is a variant of fsck for a particular file system, however fsck should detect the filesystem type and run the appropriate variant itself.
However, if you've seen instructions that suggest e2fsck, then try that first.

okey dokey, thanks! i'll try it after ive found a way to backup my files.. if i ever do..

An external HD would be an easy and cheap solution. That's what I did. I know that there are several back up services out there but I really like the idea of the external HD better.