it was rather interesting.
after a couple of tries, I was able to mount
the filesystem in question, but still could
not get fsck to run in any form on the affected 
hardware. I even tried loading modules for 
the device in question (modprobe wouldn't load).

so, I got smart instead...

I found a 500 meg drive, loaded the absolute bare minimum
linux system I could load, mounted the other filesystem 
as secondary and tar'ed all my files in the /home folder.

I was able to save everything under /home and then
formatted the drive and re-installed.

it works now, but I still have 1 or 2 nasty bugs in linuxconf
and gnome to deal with.

Hawke

plug@arcticmail.com wrote:
> 
> Eh?  fsck should be run on an UNmounted filesystem,
> using its raw (unbuffered) device (I don't think Linux
> offers raw devices, so that point is moot).
> 
> If the /dev/hdc special device file (or /dev/hdc1
> or whatever) doesn't exist on your rescue disk, then
> (hopefully) "mknod" does exist on your rescue disk,
> and you can create the special device files manually
> 
>      mknod /hdc  b 22 0
>      mknod /hdc1 b 22 1
>      mknod /hdc2 b 22 2
>      mknod /hdc3 b 22 3
>      mknod /hdc4 b 22 4
>      mknod /hdc5 b 22 5
>      mknod /hdc6 b 22 6
>      mknod /hdc7 b 22 7
>      mknod /hdc8 b 22 8
>      mknod /hdc9 b 22 9
> 
> and then run fsck or mount or dd or whatever you
> need to do
> 
>      e2fsck -fv /hdc1
>      mkdir /bar
>      mount /hdc1 /bar
> 
> Don't fret.  Absolute worst case scenario, you
> can simply restore all of your files from last
> night's full backup on your off-site triple-
> redundant tape drives.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> D
> 
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