[KLUG Members] [newbie] Unable to boot RHL 7.3

[manu@sumerusolutions.com]

Hi,

[At the outset, my apologies for the long post. I've been asking this
question on other lists with no success and I need to consolidate all my
questions in this post.]

I have a p3 machine, 40 GB harddisk partitioned into RHL7.3 and RHL9
We normally use only RHL7.3. /home is shared between 7.3 & 9
The other day while I was flushing out my iptables rules in 7.3, the system
hung and I was forced to reboot manually. Ever since, I'm unable to boot
into 7.3, but I was able to boot into RHL9 without problems.

I get a "Checking root filesystem...failed" and I'm dropped to a root
shell. My RHL7.3 resides on /dev/hda3

Doing "fsck /dev/hda3" results in:
Couldn't find matching filesystem: LABEL=/

tune2fs -L "newlabel" /dev/hda3 gives:
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock

This morning after trying fsck yet again, I switched to 9 only to find that
"Checking root filesystem failed" while booting to 9.
Apparently /home had errors, and doing an fsck on /home rectified it.

I backed-up all my data. When I mounted my 7.3 data in 9, I found that
/home on 7.3 had vanished although it still existed in 9. /home was
supposed to be shared!

Now, ls -l /dev/hda3 gives me:
ls: /dev/hda3: Input/output error

mke2fs -n /dev/hda3 gives:
Could not stat /dev/hda3 --- Input/output error.

fdisk -l /dev/hda gives [among other things]
Device      Boot   Start       End       Blocks     Id    System
/dev/hda3          2557        3321     6144862+    83    Linux


My /etc/fstab looks like this:
LABEL=/        /        ext3        defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot    /boot    ext3        defaults        1 2
none           /dev/pts devpts      gid=5,mode=620  0 0
LABEL=/home    /home    ext3        defaults        1 2
none           /proc    proc        defaults        0 0
none           /dev/shm tmpfs       defaults        0 0
LABEL=/share   /share   ext3        defaults        1 2
/dev/hda6      swap     swap        defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom     /mnt/cdrom iso9660   noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0       /mnt/floppy auto     noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

My /etc/fstab for RHL 9 is similar except that / is labelled /1 and /boot
is labelled /boot1

I can see my filesystem (7.3) when I am dropped to the root shell.
Everything seems intact (except of course for an empty /home, but that's
okay, I have a backup of that on another machine.)
I can see my partition using knoppix 2.78 too.

What could possibly be wrong? Do I have to reinstall 7.3 from scratch or is
there something I can do to get it to boot?

This machine was being used as our internal email server (in 7.3) and
it's absolutely critical that I get it up & running as fast as I can!

Any help is appreciated!

Regards,
Manu