On Mon, 30 Jan 2012, Yasha Karant wrote:

> We had a massive power failure, beyond what the UPS could handle. Despite 
> attempts to find a way for the system to shut down gracefully, it simply 
> powered down without unmounting the disk partitions. Nominally, the backup 
> local UPS I am using (APC Back-UPS 650) has an interface Port DB-9 RS-232 but 
> I have not found any Linux application that reliably would communicate with 
> this model of UPS (that is, emulate the same behavior as the application 
> available from APC for MS Win that senses the RS-232 information from APC, 
> waits the appropriate time, and then shutdown -- anyone found one?).
>
> Upon boot, automatic fsck failed, and a request was posted for root password. 
> However, no more than one character of the password would be accepted, 
> causing an endless loop to this condition and not allowing me control of the 
> system (run fsck manually).

Hi Yasha,

I wonder:

  - whether you were in fact using a journalling filesystem (because it
    should even recover from power failure like that when it is journalled)

  - what was mounted on /mnt/sysimage (as normally this is your
    root-filesystem during installation, not during runtime)

  - why you couldn't disable the filesystem in /etc/fstab, reboot and fix
    it after the system would have booted normally

  - why a filesystem like /mnt/sysimage is configured to stop the
    boot-process when it has issues (man fstab, check sixth field)

Thanks in advance for clearing the fog,
-- 
-- dag wieers, [log in to unmask], http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, [log in to unmask], http://dagit.net/

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