As I begin once more down the salvage, format, reinstall path, Im beginning to wonder if one of my disks is dodgy.

I have a 2 disk RAID 0. At Christmas while running Kubuntu the OS suffered some unknown but fatal incident. Now my Gentoo has gone a very similar way.

What I think is the maybe the most telling bit of info wrt my question, is that in both cases, when running a live CD to salvage data, the thing just crashes when I try to mount a particular partition. The first time, mounting etc in the Live CD was sure to cause a crash. This time mounting usr has the same effect.

It seems a very strange reaction to me. Could there be a disk fault? And how best to check for one? Luckily, I payed through the nose for an extended waranty, so if somethings wrong Im covered.

Try booting from a LiveCD, and running fsck against the partition. If you are using hardware RAID then it may also be worth checking if there are known bugs with the Linux drivers, but fsck is the first thing to try.

Thanks. I have run fsck and its done many things, but done of them sufficient to fix the problem ...

Its a software RAID.