"couldn't fork"?

[frank754]

I've never seen this before, but on mandrake
when I issued a pppd command that didn't
take effect well, I tried to shutdown & reboot. Upon giving the shutdown command
it went back to the console log-in and
kept issuing "couldn't fork", scrolling
over and over, and would not take root or
any other login in any console F1 F2 F3 ..
F8 etc. , so I had to cut the power. Is there
any way to avoid this. Also when rebooting,
since the ext2 drives had not been cleanly
unmounted it scanned them, one time though
I got an error and it asked "fix?" I replied
"y" but it had a message that the integrity
of the drive could be compromised. So far so
good, but what are the chances of finding some file corruption down the road?
Thanks... pls share if you have seen this
lockup too...