[K12OSN] In over my head

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 09:37, Mark Cockrell wrote:
> Per the instructions on the screen I ran "fsck" (I don't really 
> even know what that is) and answered "yes" to everything it asked me.  
> After that the system booted up, but with a number of "failed" status 
> messages during the boot process.  Now, I'm basically back to where I 
> started.  I can log on with the "Failsafe Terminal," but pretty much 
> every command returns the "segmentation fault" error message.  
> Naturally, I never bothered to make backups of anything, and I would 
> really rather avoid a rebuild.  I booted from the CD using the "linux 
> rescue" option, but really had no idea what to do once I got to the 
> command prompt.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

At the least you have filesystem corruption to the point of breaking
your shared libraries and a fairly common cause of that would be
hardware disk problems.  It is possible that losing power while the
disk is active can scribble randomly on the disk but it is equally
likely that the drive is going bad - otherwise it is unusual to lose
files that weren't being updated as the machine goes down.  The bottom
line is that trying to recover without reinstalling from scratch is
probably a waste of time and you really need to do some diagnostics
on the drive first.  If you have another machine with some disk space
for temporary storage you have a chance of being able to recover at
least some of the files over the network either using boot CD in
rescue mode or a knoppix cd if you have one. 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com