Hi Linux gurrus hope you all will be doing well. Well I am facing a problem first time in my sys admin experience. I am using RHEL-4, I am unable to access /boot partition. when i try to access this partion or want to show its contents, It seems /boot is corrupted. see the following outputs #ls /boot/ 9?^?????tdÜ°??????4?çj? #df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 145G 98G 40G 72% / /dev/sda1 1.4T 1.4T 0 100% /boot none 501M 0 501M 0% /dev/shm Note: its showing the wrong entries /dev/sda1 (1.4T) and its 100% full. #fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux /dev/sda2 14 9726 78019672+ 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 9726 78124063+ 8e Linux LVM Can any body help me whats wrong with /boot? Number of applications are being run (24x7) on this server. I cant reboot it and cant interrupt the running applications. Can any body tell me what should i do now? Server's info: #cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 5) # uname -r 2.6.9-11.ELsmp waiting for an early response. Thanks Sam

check if you are the admin if not then you might have permission problem. type #sudo ls /boot/ If this doesnt work then come back linuxant

Run as many backups as you can before you touch anything. Do some research on LVM problems with RedHat - that is how that smells to me. Let us know what you find out. ----Edit What is output of: cat /etc/fstab please? Guy

Pretty sure /boot can't be lvm and work. It doesn't look like it at first glance but I guess you could have boot on a lvm. (in which case it should have stopped long ago) I agree with the backup. Run a file system check first. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

thanks to all of you. please see the output of /etc/fstab # cat /etc/fstab # This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 / ext3 rw 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/hda /media/cdrom auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0 /dev/sdc1 /media/usbdisk2 ext3 pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0 please recommend me what sort of backups i should go for before any thing get wrong? I hope it will work until reboot because upon next reboot it wouldnt find kernal bootup image.

jefro - yeah, I know /boot cannot be LVM, but I couldn't tell/wasn't sure from what he had first posted. It should not install that way, but if it does, it certainly should not boot the first time. sam - I mean backup everything: user data (data bases, all of /home, any mods into /etc, any local installs to /usr/local, everything). It would be best if you could take images. I can not help much more with backups because of the LVM stuff. If the environment was hard partitions, just a partition copy would do in a pinch. I am anticipating you will eventually have to reboot, and you may have a totally dead system at that point. Next: On a running system, with /boot assigned it's own partition, you _should_ be able to umount it. So after the backups, try that first: umount /boot Assuming that is successful, _carefully_ run a non-destructive check, probably: e2fsck -n -v /dev/???? You have to know the device. I should have also asked you for contents of /etc/mtab. Figure the device out from there. Carefully inspect the output, and decide what to do next. Good luck. jefro (or anyone else) - does this seem like a reasonable approach? Guy ---Edit After looking again at your original output, I am guessing that /boot is on /dev/sda1

Thanks Guy, please see the output of /etc/mtab # cat /etc/mtab /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 / ext3 rw 0 0 none /proc proc rw 0 0 none /sys sysfs rw 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0 usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0 /dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0 none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0 sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0