RHEL5 Won't Exit Screensaver and Causes File System Error

[asalamon]

I've got a fresh install of RHEL5 with updates installed running on a PC104. If the machine starts up the screensaver, I can't ever get out of it. The mouse pointer comes back up on the screen, but the desktop doesn't appear or a box to enter a password. I try to reboot X and get an error that X can't be started and it drops me to a prompt. I reboot from the command line and then I get the filesystem error and have to wait 2 hours while it scans.

Any ideas?

[Rubberman]

One assumes that the PC104 card is running an Intel processor? What about video? Which video driver are you using? What are you using for disc? 2 hours for a scan means you have a REALLY big drive, or really slow I/O. Do you know which files/directories are being munged? Or is it the file system in general?

[asalamon]

It is an Intel Core 2 Duo. With a 500GB 7200RPM HDD. I can't post a URL, but search for ADL945PC to find the specs.

I switched the X11.conf to point to i810 for the video driver since the default intel wouldn't display anything over 640x480. Not sure if it is individual drivers. I think it is the file system in general. It starts the scan at startup.

[Rubberman]

You can use the tune2fs tool to change the file system so that it will only scan if the system terminated abnormally and left the file system in a "dirty" state. You can disable non-dirty checks with the command tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sdaN where 'N' is the file system number for '/', etc.

[TomKS]

I started getting the same screensaver behavior and finally tracked it down to a typo in the PAM configuration that I had made earlier in the day. It was unable to access a module and so failing to prompt me for the password.

So perhaps the filesystem error has corrupted a file needed by PAM?