What is 'Unattached inode' and how do I fix it ?

[Bob Unitt]

Hi, I thought I'd give Mint a try in place of my usual Ubuntu. I installed Mint 14 on an old Acer 4401LMi a week ago. It's been working OK up till now, but it now stays in blank screen at start-up. If I hit keys at random I eventually get a terminal-type screen with a number of repeated messages :-

/dev/sda1: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)
mountall: fsck / [923] terminated with status 4
mountall: Filesystem has errors: /
mountall: Skipping mounting / since Plymouth is not available
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
/dev/sda1: Unattached inode 736728

..and the hard-disk light stays on. Hitting keys at random (what else am I supposed to do ?) just results in the same block of messages again.

How do I get out of this ?

[zerozero]

cleaning this topic, sorry for the inconvenience

unfortunately i can't help you with the problem you're having.