Here I don't want to start a discussion, but rather share a *solution* that took me some days to come up with. The whole stuff started with a power-outage. After reboot, my server (ext3) came back with the dreaded file system error (Ctrl-D to reboot or password for maintenance) - if you've never seen this, consider yourself lucky! In any case, I did the fsck as prescribed, but abandoned the effort after having to type the 'Y' for more than 100 times; restarting fsck with '-y'. *Never* ever do this on ext3, as you will see later! It started but then informed me about " ... too many errors" or so. Next, after reboot, it came with a kernel-panic: No init found. This is almost the time for re-install, isn't it!? No, I tried the repair before. Bad luck, while reading my nice root-partition (hda6), it complained "Error mounting filesystem on hda6: Invalid argument", and "You don't have any Linux partitions. Press return ..."; though I could *see* all files on hda6 nicely at the shell. I checked fstab: okay. I could even mount /dev/hda6 to /mnt/help; looking pretty sane. Though I was loosing out on my sanity ... ! Finally, enlightenment crossed my mind and here is the problem and the solution: The "fsck -y" (see above) had not been able to handle all the errors and made the journal unusable. This is why all rescue and booting ended in disarray: the corrupted journal made the partition look invalid as ext3, though it was not so bad. I only had to convert it to ext2, have it repair all the errors and finally recreate the journal; effectively reconvert it to ext3. It is been running ever since without problem. I am even pondering to consider that behaviour a bug, since a somewhat minor problem made things worse (kernel panic!) unnecessarily. It seems the journal got corrupted not by the outage but by simply too many automated 'Y' *during repair* !? At least, it had been okay for the first boot after the outage. Remarkable! Uwe
