When I booted my laptop today, I got the following error message:
Fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root file system is currently mounted read-only. To remount it read-write do: bash mount -n -o remount,rw / Attention: Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this maintainance mode. sgutdown or reboot will not work. Give root password to log in
I logged in and executed:
reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda7
Several 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-sb
Then I realized, that /dev/hda7 is my encrypted filesystem and therefore no superblock was found. I repeated the command:
reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda6
It 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 2
I 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