Re: debian hangs during boot (at fsck stage)

[Alex Hunsley <lard@tardis.ed.ac.uk>]

Shaul Karl wrote:
> 
> >
> > Sorry, should have done some reading before posting the above, my bad...
> >
> > I've read the LILO howto and that says that pressing tab should do the trick,
> > or holding down alt or shift when the LILO bit comes up. But neither of these
> > action seem to make any difference - the machine continues booting regardless.
> >
> > thanks
> > alex
> >
> 
> I believe not being able to enter text at the lilo prompt has something
> to do with your lilo configuration but I do not know more then that. I
> do not know about the MBR thing either.
> 
> An alternative strategy might be to boot from a rescue disk and try to
> continue from there.

I've tried this and get "kernel panic: could not mount root file system." 
A screenshot is at 
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~lard/kernel.panic.jpg

I notice it mentions SCSI things again, but I've not installed any SCSI
devices.

What should I do in this situation? I'm more concerned with not losing data on
the disk than resucing my debian install, although doing both would be
preferable.

> As for the file system debug/repair tools I referred to, I meant e2fsck
> and recursively all the other programs that are mentioned in the `See
> Also' part of its manpage. If the bad partition is not ext2 then there
> should be similar programs for the relevant file system.
> When dealing with those programs you might want to compare the output
> of a well behaved partition to that of the bad one.
> Of course, these programs should be handled with extra care so that you
> will not cause damage to a healthy partition.

Ok, thanks for that info.  

alex