e2fsck w/out boot?

[Guilherme Soares Zahn <gzahn@cnen.gov.br>]

Hi there,

    I was wondering if there' s a way to run e2fsck w/out booting the
machine... I know I'd have to remount my / partition as read-only, run
e2fsck & remount the partition as rw, but I can't seem to be able to do
the first step (the system says / is busy)...

    The reason I ask that is because earlier today X aborted complaining
of (got it from syslog):

Aug 20 09:56:26 groo kernel: free_one_pmd: bad directory entry 04000000

    But when I booted the system it said /dev/hda2 is clean... I know, I
should run restart -F, but I was just wondering if there was an easier
way... ;-)

    Ciao!

    Guilherme Zahn