fatal linux boot error - any ideas?

[kohutek]

hiya ... I've got a box running linux mandrake 7.1 [yes, I know 7.2 is out] and this morning when I turned her on I got this error.

I am a linux newbie. I have no idea what this means:

Mounting proc filesystem dup2: Bad file descriptor [FAILED]

Configuring kernel parameters dpu2: Bad file descriptro [FAILED]

Setting clock (utc): Sun Jan 21 07:32:03 MST 2001 dup2: bad file descriptor [FAILED]

/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: /dev/null: Is a directory [FAILED]

Activating swap partitions dup2: Bad file descriptor [FAILED]

Setting hostname localhost.localdomain dup2: Bad file descriptor [FAILED]

Checking root filesystem - dup2 Bad file descriptor [FAILED]



it spews that out, then drops me to a bash prompt for "administrative maintenance" ...
welp, I don't know how to do that maintenance.

Any ideas on how to cure this? I finally got everything working yesterday and I'm afraid I hosed it by doing something to "dup2" [?].
thanks,
randal kohutek

 

[cirrus1]

Try to run "fsck". This will check you filesystems and promp you to fix if there is something wrong.

 

[kohutek]

I type in fsck and it replies with:

Parallelizing fsck version 1.18 (11-NOV-1999)

then it drops me back to a bash prompt.

help?
randal kohutek

 

[BOFH]

Well something failed before you listed. It would probably be mounting some other partition. fsck is File System ChecK so what you shoud do is run it on all your partitions that are not mounted by doing fsck /dev/partnumber ie fsck /dev/hda5. compairing the output of mount to /etc/fstab should tell you what is/isnot mounted

 

[Damaged]

Uh, actually he needs to run it manually if he's getting dumped to the single user prompt. To do that you could issue: fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdXX or you could try automatic fsck -a /dev/hdXX. First try automatic, if that fails try telling it the superblock location, usually 8193 sometimes 8192. Where /dev/hdXX represents a IDE disk and the XX represents the disk letter and the partition number respectively. If you have SCSI drives then it's going to be /dev/sdXX. You will need to do this on all your partitions one at a time. It should fix the errors.

This is pretty much what BOFH said, I'm just expanding on it a bit.