[H-GEN] Linux file system problems

[Russell Stuart]

On Sat, 2011-04-30 at 18:07 +1000, Gavin Duley wrote:
> At this point, it looks like it had brought up a shell, and I should
> be able to enter commands and maybe do something useful to fix the
> problem. Unfortunately not. I tried typing in 'help', but nothing was
> echoed to screen, and it did not seem to have any effect. 

Odd, you should have got something back.  But the shell prompt isn't
much use if you don't have a working root partition as no filesystems
tools (eg fsck) are available.

> I also tried fsck, but also ran into problems:
> root at ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# fsck /dev/sda4
>
> It's not mounted:

How do you know /dev/sda4 is the right drive?  An ls of /sys/block will
tell you what block devices are available.  fdisk -l /dev/sda will show
the layout of the disk.

If you are sure /dev/sda4 is correct, lsof /dev/sda4 will list the
processes that have /dev/sda4 open.  Use that to kill the offending
process and then you can run fsck.