I have Red Hat Linux 7 (and the "For Dummies" book that goes with it) installed on a comp. My father gave me this for Christmas saying that it was vitually crash proof.

Uh....then it crashed.

So...the system won't boot up. It goes through the diagnostics-for-those-who-don't-shut-it-down-properly and then prompts me to either enter the root password to correct the troubles or to hit "Ctrl D" to reboot again (which takes me to exactly the same location...where I am stuck again).

Soo....I booted up my old windows based system to try and get some online help...and here I am. I guess that you didn't need my life's story huh? Okay...so there we are in the "stuck" mode and I find this "fsck" (and the *only* reason one of *those* letters is different is for the Linux censors, believe me) command in association with the shell. So I tried entering the password and it asked me for some key word in line #1, then I entered "fsck"...it moved on to #2, I entered the same "fsck" again...by about line #400, I'd had enough and thought that there *had* to be an easier way.

Can anyone (hopefully several anyones) help me with this please? And, uh, maybe recommend a good site or book where I can learn *not* to offend my Linux system and what to do it I accidentally do?

Thank you so much,

Trif

Wow, what a story. That is something which I haven't heard about at all, and assuming the disk you have is correct (ie it contains all necessary files etc...) then it sounds as if Red Hat doesn't like you! ;). Only joking, some course of action could be a complete re-install. Did the installation process go okay? Any errors? Did you follow the book to install it. I haven't read that book itself but I don't really like the 'Dummies' books for any topic. Still mustn't judge a book by its title, or something like that.

As for recommending a book have a look at the thread in the newbie forum about that very topic. For information on the web you wont get a better resource than http://www.linuxdoc.org for a list of How-To's and other such info.

Hey, guess what....

I got the answer and didn't have to reinstall Linux!

The answer was to enter the password when cued, then type "fsck /" (with a space in the middle).

It prompted me to answer corrections and we're up and running in Linux again!

Thank you very much for your help!

Trif

[Edited by Trifan on 12-31-2000 at 10:42 PM]