[wplug] Well, now I've gone and done something......

[William N. Powell]

I apparently have done something to damage the file system(s) on my laptop. The system started reporting that /dev/null was a read-only file system. (I always figured it was write-only!) Prior to that as a normal 
user, I attempted to redirect stderr to /dev/null to get rid of error messages from the command line.

Obviously, I did something more than redirect stderr! I am not worried about what I did then, just how to fix what I have now.

Now it boots up to the (repair filesystem) prompt.

The laptop is a P133 running RH 8 with 32M of memory.  This is a utility laptop and works pretty good with limited memory for what it is used for, so upgrading the system isn't really on the table.

/dev/hda1 is a 500 MB FAT16 partition and used to contain Win 98. I wiped that and just use it for backup info now.

/dev/hda2 is about 100 MB ext3. No reference to /dev/hda2 in mtab or fstab.

/dev/hda3 is 128 MB SWAP partition.

/dev/hda4 is 5 gig ext3 / containing the rest of the system and is mounted currently per /etc/mtab

dmesg doesn't show a particular errors, the last two lines are:

EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 200k freed

nothing in /var/log/messages jumps out at me, but all stderr output may have gone to /dev/null or other non-recoverable ether devices.

My home directory is intact and appears undamaged.

I guess my next step is to get a bootable floppy rescue disk so that I can do a full fsck on /dev/hda4 when it is not mounted.

What is the best was to proceed from this point?

Bill