unable to boot system! Why?

[igueths at attbi.com]

Hi Adam. I could get into the system through some rescue disks I had created 
from speakup/disks/debia/potato. I ran fsck and oddly enough, that produced no 
errors at all. I can see all my data htere i.e., I can read textfile susing ae 
which is the editor on that rescue diskset. Fsck ran as if there were no errors 
in the filesystem. And I can't rerun Lilo, I got the error I described even 
before I coppied the libs over. And when I checked /target/lib, which is the 
lib directory on the hdd, I saw all the libs there that I had always seen. I 
didn't see anything that had been modified. Before I powered down the system, I 
checked ps and there was no process called updatedb. I actually set that to run 
at 11:00 every night, and the system went down at about 5:38 PM EDT. So 
therefore, I have no idea how the system slowed down like that and also no idea 
of how to account for that significant disk I/O. I believe what the problem is 
is that all my data is there, however lilo somehow killed itself. I thought of 
running liloconfig, however I can't do that right now as I don't have access to 
my box from here. Anyone have nay other ideas on how to fix this? Thanks again!
> Did you run fsck on your partition from the rescue disk?  Since you gave
> it a rather abrupt power-down, it probably needs to be checked and fixed
> if possible.  Start with "fsck -p /dev/hda2" where you put in the correct
> partition name.  If you have more than one partition, check them all.
> This instructs fsck to fix anything that is safe to fix without causing
> data loss.  If it exits with an error, you are going to have to run it and
> answer "yes" to the repair questions by hand, but there is a high
> possibility in this case that something has gotten damaged somewhere and
> it will be restored to a file with a garbage name in /lost+found.
> Assuming you can repair the damage to the filesystem, try to boot the hard
> drive from the rescue disk.  Better still, did you make a boot disk when
> you installed?  You should try to boot that once you've run fsck.  If you
> can get into the system from the boot disk, you may be able to re-run
> Lilo.  BTW, you probably shouldn't have copied the lib directory from the
> rescue disk as it's likely somewhat incomplete and you may end up
> reinstalling libraries.  I'd sure love to know what crashed on you.  Did
> you see a process called updatedb by any chance?  If so, it's best to let
> it run its course.  It's a package that often gets installed by default
> that indexes all the files on your system and lets you locate a file
> quickly from that index rather than having to do a full search of the hard
> drive.  You can say something like "locate lynx," and it will look in the
> index and tell you where lynx was at the time of its creation.  Most newly
> installed systems have updatedb run from cron daily.  Redhat, and possibly
> Debian, have something called anacron which will run missed cron jobs.
> Hope this helps.
> 
> 
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