Trouble began when my computer slowed down terribly ( CPU idle, no swap ), and I was in a hurry so I manually shut it down.
Now, every time I try to start RH 9, I get kernel panic, no init found.
Then I restart and it suggests running fsck manually ( "unexpected inconsistency ; run fsck manually" ), which I do. In the first pass it found a lot of bad blocks, I told him yes to ignore errors and to force rewrite every time. Now when I run fsck it finds only error reading block 7710, and later reports 1.5% files non-contiguous.
After that I can boot RH if I don't do system scan ( it says computer was shut down improperly, even though it wasn't ). Upon booting, I get all sorts of crazy errors, and after a while system becomes read-only, after which I pretty much can't do anything, even shut it down or reboot normally. It prints following message to console screen: "ext3-fs errror ( device ide0(3,6)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted".
I haven't noticed any problems on windows.
Question: is this a hard disk or linux problem? How can I fix the problem, do I need a new hard disk?

Thanks in advance

"is this a hard disk or linux problem? "

The problem is that your file system is corrupt.

"How can I fix the problem"

Back up as much data as you can, if you haven't backed up already. Format the partition. Restore the partition. Do not use the dd command to backup and restore.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the answer