System locks up at log in

[RyanGT]

I recently caused a problem with my Fedora Core 2 installation by trying to add an additional fat32 partition with Partition Commander. Partition Commander decided to create the partition by taking space from my swap partition. By the time I got this undone, my system would lock up whenever I tried to log in. It seems to boot o.k. up to the log in screen, then it switches to the screen where the little system icons usually show up as things are starting up, only now it stops on the first one or none at all and just sits there.

I tried removing the line that mounts the swap partition from the fstab file, but that doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

I am fairly new to Linux. Can someone help me trouble shoot and solve this problem.

Ryan

[ilja]

Do you have still the swap partition?
Try to start boot without the rhgb (grafical-boot). When you computer boots up and grub appears, where you can choose which kernel-version to start type e and delete rhgb from the boot line. Then try to start and see what happens.

How much ram do you have?

[RyanGT]

I have 630 megs of ram.

I am at work right now and can't try this until later. Are you saying I press 'e' at the grub screen?

[RyanGT]

And yes, I think I still have the swap partition. Partition Commander shows that it is still there and the ccorrect size and lists it as Linux Swap. Should I do something else to verify this? fdisk? fsck?

[ilja]

It is possible, that the order was changed.
fdisk -l will show you the order of the partitions and so you can see in fstab, whether the entry is still correct.

[RyanGT]

Thanks for your thoughts so far.

When I delete the rhgb line from grub, the system stalls on "starting sshd:NET: Registered protocol family10". I have no idea what that means.

When I boot into rescue mode and run fdisk -l, almost all of my partitions list a warning that they don't end on cylinder boundry, but they are there including the swap. There is also a warning that partition table entries are not in disk order.

When I try to run fsck from rescue mode, it doesn't seem to want to comply. If I don't enter chroot /mnt/sysimage, there is some message about missing fstab file. If I make my system image the root, I get a warning that running fsck on a mounted filesystem can cause serious problems. Eventually, forcing a system integrity check when my boot process says my system shut down irregularly did drop me into a console where I could run fsck. Everything went fine except that hda6 can a warning that fsck.swap was not found (hda6 is the swap).

What should I try nexy?

[RyanGT]

I think I have solved the problem. I was about to give up and reinstall Linux. I figured if I do that, I might as well switch to GenToo, since I had been considering it anyways. The GenToo install cd comes with a version of fdisk that gives you the option to delete and create partitions (I don't think the fdisk on the Fedora Linux Rescue CD gives you this option). Anyways, I thought before I completely reinstall Linux, I will try and delete and recreate the swap partition. I followed the GenToo fdisk instructions and then rebooted into Fedora, and it seems to have worked.

Ryan

[ilja]

yes, I heard that gentoo has a great instruction