Dinamis

I noticed my IBM ThinPad A21p running Mandrake 9.1 was taking an inordinate amount time to boot so I paid attention to where it was stuck. The machine seemed to have hung at the "Loading sound module" step of the boot process so I just powered off and restarted the machine. This time, I got a notice that the filesystem needed checking but when I typed "Y", it complained that there was no such file as e2fsck.hda1, or something to that effect. Mandrake suggested that I should run e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda1. I did that but this time it responded:

"The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 "

I went on a wild goose chase on Google looking for a solution. I had the same problem about eight months ago and had fixed it relatively quickly but did not remember what I had done. One fellow suggested that I should run e2fsck with other superblocks because the first superblock seemed to be corrupted. I ran:

mk2efs -n /dev/hda1

but Mandrake complained there was no such device.

ll /dev/hda*

confirmed what Mandrake was complaining about. There really was no block device for /dev/hda1. There was a block device for /dev/hda and for /dev/hda2 through /dev/hda16 but not /dev/hda1. No wonder it was complaining! This was the same problem I had last year. I attempted to create the device by typing:

mknod /dev/hda1 b 3 1

but Mandrake complained that /dev/hda1 was a read only device which was strange since it did not exist. The mount command confirmed that /dev/hda1 was indeed mounted as rw. I do not understand how that was possible since there was no block device for /dev/hda1. I booted from Knoppix and ran:

mount /dev/hda1
cp -a /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1/dev/

I rebooted and Mandrake booted without complaint and after running e2fsck, all was well.