> 
> When I booted again, I got an error obviously coming from my rc file saying
> that fsck found an unknown error or something to that effect.  It's the
> last error in the case statement in rc.  I tried rebooting a couple of
> times and got the same error.  I had to go in single-user mode, read-only.
> I'm not sure if what I did next was good, but I figured since it was in
> read-only mode that there wouldn't be much harm caused since fsck won't do
> anything to a mounted file system.  fsck comes up with no problems when I
> run it from a shell prompt.  It only gives me an unknown error when I'm
> booting.
> 
> Does anyone know what could be the problem?

Your file system might be really hosed.

Whenever you have to reboot w/o shutting down (like hit the debugger or
the power), then you need to reboot into single user mode and fsck
everything. You can get weird filesystem corruption otherwise. You might
still get corruption, but you'll get less this way.

You might hve noticed the chicken-and-egg problem with fsck'ing the
root filesystem. You can't fsck a mounted system, but you have to
get fsck off the system.

When you're in single user mode, the root filesystem is read-only so that
you can fsck it. I think you're supposed to reboot immediately after
modifying it, but I don't and haven't crashed TOO hard yet. YMMV.

Colin's advice looks good. Try his fsck prescription, and see what
happens. Then boot single user and fsck any other partitions (skip if
you only have one).

If fsck complains that the fs is clean; not checking, invoke it with
the "-f" option to Force it to check.

If you still get errors, copy them and send them to the list.

Take care,

Bill