Hi everyone,

Last week Linux froze up on me. When I went to re-boot, it failed the filesystem integrity check. I was dropped into a shell and ran fsck. I got tons of error messages of the type:

"error reading block 2490531 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while doing inode scan. Ignore<y>?

Force rewrite<y>?"

and, occasionally I would get an error message like:

"Inode 2469622, i_blocks is 136, should be 104. Fix<y>?"

(of course the numbers were different). After going through probably over a hundred of theses fixes, and several unsuccessful reboot/integrity failure cycles, I finally gave up and re-installed Redhat 9 from scratch. Everything worked ok for a few days, but now I'm having the same problem again, and I can't get back into linux.

My windows partition seems to work fine (although I don't use it as frequently as the Linux partition). In 1.5 years of running my Windows/Linux partition on this machine, this is the first time I've had this problem.

1) Is this a software problem? Is there something I should be doing before I reinstall RH9 so that whatever is corrupting the filesystem does not re-occur?
Or,

2) Is this a hardware problem? Do I need to replace the HD? Or will I just be wasting my money and have the same problem on the new drive?

I welcome any and all suggestions you might have. Many thanks in advance.

Your hard drive is near death. Replace it. Hard drive's rarely just completely fail. You are lucky in that you have some time as sector's seem to be slowly degrading in your case. In a couple of weeks, your hard drive will be smoked. Back up your data, buy a new hard drive, and reinstall your OS(s). I'm suprised you've not seen this before, but whatever. I must be old.

Yes, usually with just a windows partition when the H/D goes bad you will hear grinding noises!!
that is the indication the drive is going bad............

Now with fsck messages like this, it is an early warning, so take heed and replace the drive NOW!! before the
grinding noises start, and you can save your data by backing up what you want.

Thank you Thoreau and 320mb,

I'll start the process of migrating to a new drive today.

I guess I'm disappointed that the disk that came with my Gateway (in this case a Maxtor 80GB) lasted less than two years.

Once again, many thanks.

Hi,

I just finished transferring to a new disk. For the sake of completeness, I just wanted to confirm the diagnosis of a dying disk. When I tried to clone the old disk to the new one (the same day I wrote the last post), I ran into thousands of read errors (I stopped the copy process after getting 4000 bad sectors in a row). Eventually I had to resort to restoring an old backup.

But now I'm back in business.

Thanks again for the good advice.