I would like something explaining.
Background: I have a drive with Debian,Ubuntu 9.10 (including 2 systems on Virtualbox) and Mint. Debian is the trunk installation and neither that or mint has Vbox on it.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 5471 43945776 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 13344 13498 1245037+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 * 5472 6322 6835657+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 6323 13343 56396182+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 6323 6617 2369556 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 6618 9882 26226081 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 9883 13194 26603608+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 13195 13343 1196811 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 516 MB, 516685824 bytes
3 heads, 18 sectors/track, 18688 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 54 * 512 = 27648 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


Problem is that it (ubuntu 9.10) only boots occasionally.
I have to run fsck from Debian to enable this and only certain options work,i.e., -y returns that the partition is clean but -f returns a result of 31% non-contiguous. Can anyone explain?

Fred.

That's not a show stopper.


Try to see the percentage of non-contiguous files as an indication of file-system fragmentation, not as an indication of physical disk problems. If you want to ensure the disk is OK (even after fsck returned OK already) then feel free to run 'fsck' with "-c" (as in 'badblocks').


On fridays only? After sacrificing a goat to the SCSI chain? Can you provide 'dmesg' output, screenshots of where it halts (if it boots), anything else that might be interesting?

I tried to run and return 'dmesg' but it was reported as too long to paste in this space. I ran fsck with the 'c' option but that was not reproducible. The last couple of lines that came back from fsck c were:

file system modified
/dev/hda6 878/1643376 files(31.3% non-contiguous), 165524/6556520 blocks.

Any clues?

Fred.