For now I'm working on the assumption that hdb is dying and running fsck.ext3 -f /dev/hdb1
It found a bunch of illegal blocks and cleared them and has been trying to clear the inode but is not progressing and the HD is on a permanent cycle of whirr-click-pause.

Just hope I can save something off it.

I gave up pressing Y after about 100,000 of these:

but a HD is still making that same, infuriating sound...

About a year ago I had a hd that went and took a powersupply with it. If I remember the case got warm and everything slowed down also. I thought it was the powersupply and replaced it first and turned the set on and left for a minute and came back to a smell and it had burned the new powersupply.

Might be something to that alright. My system won't shut down now - seems it can't umount hda which is also full of bad sectors. Looks like I'll be buying one, 500GB HD and taking out the others before they cause any more damage.

If the data on that HD is important, you might try a couple of things with it.

It occasionally will work to put the HD in a baggie and put it in the freezer long enough for it to freeze. Then pull it out of the freezer, plug it in, start the 'puter, and immediately try to get all data off the disk. As I say, this sometimes works.

You also might try spinright www.grc.com. This utility is amazing; I have brought many hard drives back "from the dead" for at least a few hours. The last one I recovered would only work if it was on its side. So I propped it on its side, ran spinright, then extracted the contents of the entire drive, without loss. Of course, spinright will cost you some $$$ but if your data is sufficiently valuable to you, this might work.

Caveat; drive must spin and heads must move or nothing will help.

So, I umounted both IDE drives, with a view to replacing them both by one large drive next weekend. And what do you know, the system still freezes up...

Grab the SMART Linux bootable floppy, you can check use it to check the Hard drives. If indeed the drive is bad and you replace it I would recommend installing the smart daemon on your new system to monitor your Hard drive. It will give you EARLY notification the drive is failing so you can get your data and everything to a new drive before the old one fails completely.

http://smartlinux.sourceforge.net/

Also remember bad RAM or bad Cache memory on the system can cause corruption of the data on the drives..

Bad capacitors on the motherboard will cause lockup issues like you are describing. these problems will get progressively worse over time.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

A power supply that is getting weak could also cause you issues..

It may have nothing to do with your problem but...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....20/+bug/94862

Just my 5 pence about crashes

Never thought of that one, if you have a live cd just unplug your hds and see if everything will work without slowing down. If everything still slows down I think it might get more expensive than a hd. If you think heat has something to do with it, pull a side off of the case and stick a house fan to the side and put it on medium. I've done that before when setting up a new set with multiple distros to keep the heat down.

The link got truncated.

Meanwhile, I reformatted my main hard drive, reinstalled my OS (twenty-five minutes to get back to a completely set-up system, got to love that!) and changed to an older gfx driver version. I haven't had a lock up all day and I even ran google-earth twice for a few minutes with no crashes.
When I mount hdb things get worse; copying files to and from it takes absolutely ages. I reformatted hda and will test copying to/from that for a day or two, maybe try read/writing hdb in a PC at work, make sure the problem (well, one of the many) is with the drive(s) and not the mobo, then replace the defective hardware.

The case has been open all week, and been well dusted out.

Sorry, here's the link again



https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....20/+bug/94862

however, it's very unlikely now that it will be the case
It was just something that happened to me when the computer crashed a lot

regards

So... I'm back. I got my new 500GN HD today and plugged it in. Fired up Qtparted and began to format the whole thing as ext3. Got as far as 30% and then it began... whirr-click-stop. Crawled up another 5% and then the whole system froze up again. Rebooted, opened firefox, got as far as here. Stoney system death.
I'd had two weeks wherein I'd disconnected the HD and installed more adequate graphics drivers and had no problems.
So, back to square one, 130 euros out of pocket and still clueless...

I hope you don't do like I did and replacing parts on my first computer one at a time. Before I got it fixed (bad video card "sometimes") it cost me more than a new box would have cost me.

One user replied to you regarding a CPU heating problem, and I didn't see that you tended to his/her suggestion. If your unit passes memtest but dies after a few minutes of normal use, it's likely that your heatsink fins are dirty and need cleaning. Also if your CPU happens to be a Prescott then you're instantly in a heat scenario and you need to change your heatsink from the stock one that was supplied with the CPU.

This thread is almost a year old (10 months) .. I would hope he sorted out the issue or replaced the system by now...