Reiserfsck and repairing the root partition using the Knoppix CD
Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 2 min read • 307 wordsWhen I booted my laptop today, I got the following error message:Fsck failed.
reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda7Several error messages appeared, among them in the end:reiserfs_open: the reiserfs superblock cannot be found on /. Failed to open the filesystem.Then it said somthing like that the superblock is corrupted and if I am sure that I am dealing with a reiserfs partition, I can rebuild it using the command:reiserfsck --rebuild-sbThen I realized, that /dev/hda7 is my encrypted filesystem and therefore no superblock was found. I repeated the command:reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda6It told me that the option “–fix-fixable” will be ignored. I don’t know why. Maybe because I have mounted the system from the same partition I am about to fix. Anyway, the message in the beginning The root file system is currently mounted read-only. To remount it read-write do: bash mount -n -o remount,rw /tempted me to remount it in read-write mode and to execute the command again. But with no result. So I booted from the Knoppix CD and executed from there. The filesystem replayed, but no errors were found.Then I remembered that I had modified the fstab yesterday by adding: /dev/sda1 /media/firewire reiserfs noauto,user 1 2I thought that the noauto option prevents the partition from being accessed during bootup. Apparently not and the problematic entry a the two numbers in the end (1 2). They determine whether a filesystem is checked on bootup. I set them to “0 0” and tried to reboot.Voila, everything is fine again.Otherwise I might have tired to rebuild the superblock from Knoppix:reiserfsck --rebuild-sb /dev/hda6