Mandriva boot troubleshooting

[parfaitmoon2]

thank you every body to help me

i m a new madriva 2008 linux user, and i have a boot problem after my laptop was shutdown accidently in abnormal way( kid pressing shut button)

when i start it checks for errors and found the in a file system and ask me to provide a root password for maintenance but i m sure i ve never provide any at set up time . what can i do since to uninstall can harm my XP OS.

the final message is :
GIVE THE ROOT PASSWORD FOR MAINTENANCE (or type Control-D to continue):

NB after it reboot and became over and over the same thing , i dont want to unstall it because i ve never done this before it can harm windowsXP

[yancek]

Usually this message "GIVE THE ROOT PASSWORD FOR MAINTENANCE' appears when a system is starting in single user mode. Single user mode is primarily used to deal with problems as the linux standard is multi-user mode. It is running a fsck (file system check). What error message to you get? When you type Control-D, what happens?

I don't have Mandriva but so I'm not sure but most linux systems require a password for root during installation. If you didn't assign one during install when you get the message to "GIVE ROOT PASSWORD' just hit enter and see if that works.

[parfaitmoon2]

when i press control-D it reboot again and stop at the earlier stage asking to provide the boot password. this happen over and over again , no other alternative.

in this case , supppose password not provided, no other option to resolve that ?

thank you

[yancek]

Did you try just hitting 'enter' when you get the prompt to enter root password? If you didn't set a password, that might work. Your filesystem was damaged somehow so you might try a web search 'repair linux filesystem'. Don't know wwhat else to suggest. Good Luck.

[parfaitmoon2]

when i press enter , it says login failed :


see what message provided at boot time:
checking root file system
/dev/sda5 contains a a file system with errors, check forced unattached inode 1242844.

[yancek]

If login failed after hitting enter, that means there is a password. You said you were a new user, did you complete the install? Some distros will have the password 'root' to login during the install, try that. You might go to the Mandriva website and look through their install instructions or documentation to see what you can find. Are you still able to access your XP? If so, you could delete the Mandriva partition (sda5?) through XP with fdisk or whatever utility XP has (never used it). Then if you choose, you can re-format and re-install.

There are a number of sites on the web relating to 'removing Linux and installing windows', check those out. Don't know enough about repairing damaged filesystems to give you any suggestions on that.

[GinnyBhullar]

when i press enter , it says login failed :


see what message provided at boot time:
checking root file system
/dev/sda5 contains a a file system with errors, check forced unattached inode 1242844.

Do one thing start ur system in Windows, right click the corresponding drive for which error was given in Linux. Use the tools tab ans use the 1st tool to repair the drive. or u can use chkdsk utility to repair ur drive. Usually linux gives these kinds of errors if any bad sector is on the Hard disk. Do these things and tell what happens after this.