[PLUG] HELP -- Superblock problem

[Carlos Konstanski]

On Wed, 2 May 2007, William A Morita wrote:

> Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 06:42:59 -0700
> From: William A Morita <wamorita at hevanet.com>
> To: "'General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic'"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] HELP -- Superblock problem
> 
> I need help with a SuperBlock problem.
> My White Box Linux system won't boot because it indicates a problem with the
> SuperBlock on my root partition.
> It suggests running e2fsck b=xxx on the partition containing my root (/).
> I have successfully run e2fsck using b=32768, but it still refuses to mount
> / during boot.
> I have run mke2fs -S on the partition, followed by a e2fsck.
> Still no joy. Same error message
> I have booted Knoppix and can mount the partition without a problem.
>
> Suggestions on where to go from here?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
> - Bill Morita
>
> wamorita at hevanet.com
> Home: (503) 697-6994
> Cell: (503) 260-3876

As crazy as it might sound, you may want to make sure your White Box
is loading the appropriate kernel module(s) to enable disk access
(namely, the ext3 module, plus any lower-level disk access drivers
like libata).  I'll bet that knoppix is loading the necessary drivers,
and an lsmod will reveal all.

Once booted under knoppix, you could chroot to your root filesystem
and build a new, custom kernel that has all the necessary drivers
compiled into the kernel image, avoiding the module issue altogether.
It's nice to avoid having to troubleshoot initrd images.

Carlos Konstanski