VMware guest not booting; dropping to maintenance mode

Issue

• Guest RHEL 4 system installed on VMware host machine is unable to boot correctly - it drops to maintenance mode. Fsck gives lot of inode issues.

  fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/VolGroup02/LogVol03:
  The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.
  *** An error occured during the file system check
  *** Dropping to a shell; the system will reboot
  *** When you leave the shell
  Give root password for maintenance
  (or type control-D to continue):
  

• From rescue mode and then running the lvm command doesn't work.

• Activated the lvms. Then running e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup02/LogVol03 gave the same inode errors as earlier.