Marvin Stodolsky wrote:
There is a faulty ext3 journal on my Debian desktop system (currently on laptop),blocking booting or e2fsck.The precipating event may have been the copying of a tarball to /root/ which exceeded Root's reserve space.The shut down appeared normal, but the reboot failed. I have an alternate RedHat partition for developement purpuses. When I try to fsck the Debian /dev/sda2 therefrom, there is a complaint about the Journal and fsck quits.How could I disable the ext3 Journal, so that the file system could be more directly FSCKed?
I believe this would be tune2fs. The -0 option should allow you to clear the has_journal option of the filesystem. According to the man page, it appears that prefixing the option with '^' will clean the option (whereas '+' will set the option). On my reading of the man page, "tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda2" might be what you want.
But I can't recommend this as I have never encountered your problem myself. See whether something along these lines isn't what seems to you to be what you need.
It sounds like an unappealing situation either way. dircha