debian hangs during boot (at fsck stage)
I'm having trouble with my debian 2.2r3 (potato) box. For the past two weeks
its been sitting happily on the network, doing things as expected, but now it
hangs during boot. I was running samba, and a few times whilst copying lots of
files from a win2000 machine to the debian box I encountered errors - the last
time this happened, I got the message "couldn't copy file, network name not
found" on my win2000 machine. Then it seemed my debian box had disapeared off
the network (as far as ping, ssh, smb went). I tried pinging from other
machines and they all couldn't contact my box. As my machine was now sitting in
a cupboard with no monitor or keyboard, I elected to just power down and
power-up again (bad idea). The machine wouldn't reappear on the network, so I
lugged a monitor and keyboard to it - turns out its hanging during boot. It
gets to fsck, where it says that one partition wasn't cleanly mounted, at which
point it freezes and doesn't boot any further. Oh yes, before this point it
does appear to do a check of some sort on a partition - the progress meter
appears and goes up to 100% and disapears.
I've put up a digital photo of the screen at the point the machine hangs at
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~lard/fsck.hang.jpg
My system has done fsck partition integrity checks before without having any
problems. Could this problem be anything to do with the fact the hard disk is
connected as a UDMA66 device and not a normal IDE drive? When I installed it, I
used the UDMA66 flavour kernel and had no problems...
cheers
alex
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