These are the type of things that can be difficult to do over email...

Try mounting the /dev/sda6 after fsck in rescue mode and make sure the filesystem has at least 10% free space.
Is it ext2, 3, or 4, or other?

What other partitions are on /sda?  I assume /boot is one, any others?


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dormition Skete (Hotmail)" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 4:34:00 PM
> Subject: Boot hangs / loops
> 
> 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
>