Need to fix badly-mounted partition.

[Derek Broughton]

Dotan Cohen wrote:

> Thanks. I have on that disk:
> hda2: /
> hda3: /home/user/pictures
> hda5: swap
> hda6: /home
> 
> All except for hda3 are nessacary for booting. How do I know which
> partition is 'bad'?

I thought you said that it happened on your ~/music partition.  Is that a
partition, or not? 

It's guaranteed that the reported problem is not on hda5, because a swap
partition is not an ext2/ext3 partition.

> And what does it mean to fsck a disk? I know that fsck is a partition
> tool, but what is actually happening? Thanks.

It's not, it's a File System ChecK tool (ie, it doesn't work on _partitions_
it works on _file systems_ - which is why it does nothing on your swap
partition).

go to single user mode.  umount -a (which won't dismount /, but worry about
that later).  Then, for each ext2/ext3 partition:
 fsck -A -R -s -r -t ext2,ext3

man fsck so that you understand all the options I gave you.  Once you're
happy with the results of that:
 mount / -o ro,remount
 fsck -r /

Then you should probably reboot, as the easiest way to get back to normal.
-- 
derek