Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I installed BL2 to an old 486 notebook I had this past summer.  I had to
remove the HD and do the bulk of the install by hooking it to a desktop
computer, since the floppy drive on this machine is non-functional.
Today, I had the machine running on its battery unattended and, of
course, the battery ran low.  By the time I discovered this, it had
already begun to beep, like it does some seconds before powering off from
low battery power.  I thought I might have enough juice to shut down BL
normally, so I ran shutdown -h now.  It started the shutdown process, but
in the middle the power shut off.  BL's shutdown routine didn't have a
chance to finish.  Now, when I try to start BL, I get HD errors.  fsck
won't run, and after a couple of these errors I am dumped off at a bash
prompt (from which fsck won't run either): maybe this is busybox?

I think what I need to do to attempt to correct this error is to run
fsck/e2fsck.  Does everyone agree?  If so, I need to figure out how.  The
machine has no working floppy, as I mentioned.  It has a PCMCIA network
card, but that is useless without PCMCIA functionality - which is
installed on the BL partition I can't boot.  I have a DOS partition on
this drive (PTS DOS) which still boots fine (no PCMCIA functionality
there), and I run the BL boot script from there.  I also have the ramdrive
version of BL2 set up there, so I can boot into it.  Unfortunately, it
does not include fsck/e2fsck, and of course it can't handle PCMCIA either.

I would appreciate suggestions on how I might recover from this error -
assuming it's not a physical problem with the HD.

Thanks, James