I needed some more storage space on our SL6.5 server, so I hooked up a USB external drive to the machine.  The external drive had a Macintosh file system on it, so I installed kmod-hfsplus from the elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-5-el6.elrepo.noarch.org repository.  I mounted the drive, and everything worked fine.  I could read and write files to it just fine.  I set up a file share under Samba, and that worked fine, too.

Then I made the stupid mistake of trying to delete a bunch of files off of it using nautilus from a thin client, rather than from the command line.  

In the middle of the deletion process, it took the entire server down.  Now it won’t reboot.

Whenever I try to reboot it, I get the following message:

—

Checking file systems.
/dev/sda6 is in use.
e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.

*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you into a shell; The system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.

—

I booted it from a Rescue CD, and did not mount the volumes.  I ran fsck on the two Linux ext4 file systems with:

fsck /dev/sda6   (my / file system)
fsck /dev/sda7  (my /home file system)


That did not help.  Something gave me the thought to try changing the labels in the /etc/fstab file.  I changed the “UUID=…..” with the device names /dev/sda5 (swap), 6 and 7.


That didn’t help.

I tried booting it with “fastboot” in the kernel line, and that places me in a perpetual loop.  I get a message saying:

—

Warning — SELinux targeted policy relabel is required.

Relabeling could take a very long time, depending on 
file system size and speed of hard drives.

—

I’ve also tried putting “fastboot enforcing=0 autorelabel=0” in the kernel line, and that does not seem to do anything.


Without “fastboot”, I get the file system check kicking me into a maintenance prompt.  

With “fastboot”, I get the perpetual SELinux relabeling.


I also find it really odd that when I changed the fstab entries, I first made a backup copy of the fstab file.  I also copied the existing lines I was going to change, commented them out, and changed the second set of lines.  Neither the backup fstab file, nor the commented lines are anywhere to be found.

If somebody would please help me get this machine back up, I would *greatly* appreciate it!

Peter, hieromonk