broken filesystem - give root password for maintenance

[vitko]

I'm trying to repair/upgrade broken Hoary notebook of my friend - filesystem
is  broken and on boot I'm getting something like this:

    ... run fsck manually ...
    ... give root password for maintenance or press CTRL+D to continue ...

CTRL+D causes restart, another fsck run and another prompt for root
password. I'm already repairing the filesystem from live Slax CD, but
how would I do broken fs maintenace with Ubuntu's no root password
policy?

Thanks for comments,

Vit

Post scriptum: Please reply to vitko at post dot cz, I'm not subscribed
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