Help! Can't recover!

["Adam C. Powell, IV" <adam powell nist gov>]

Hello,

Just crashed my machine (doing something stupid), so I hit reset, and
did something bad to my /usr partition.  When coming up, it got to
"/dev/hda4 contains errors, check forced" and then something like
"UNEXPECTED ERROR in /dev/hda4.\nEnter root password for maintenance or
hid Ctrl-D to continue startup".

I tried the root password about five times, and each time not only did
it not work, it shut down and rebooted.

So, I tried ^D, which shut down and rebooted- twice.

The third time, I accidentally hit ^C instead, which dumped my to the
login screen.  Cool.  But I could not log in as root- it would quickly
flash a bunch of lines starting with "do_ypcall" to the effect that the
network was unreachable, and then dump back to the login screen.  And
all of the users are via NIS, so of course it didn't recognize any
usernames/passwords.  Uncool.

So, I shut down and rebooted from the RedHat 5.1 emergency disk and
ramdisk, which brings me into the installer.  Unfortunately, unlike the
Intel version (or LinuxPPC for that matter) which I've used more
recently, there is no shell console, so I have no way to run e2fsck!

So I am stuck.  Is there anything I can do aside from a total
reinstall?  Is there anyway to break the installer so it dumps me to a
shell?

Zeen,

-Adam `Cold Fusion' Powell, IV http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~powell/ ____
USDoC, National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)  |\ ||<  |
Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science  | \||_> |