Hi all,

I've been running Slack 10.1 on my laptop for about three months. fsck ran at boot, which is fine because it had booted twenty-odd times without being check. However, up popped an error message saying the filesystem on my hard drive was corrupt!

I followed the instructions it gave and was greeted with page after pages of prompts asking if I wanted to fix a bad block on inode number whatever it was. Not knowing any better, I answer yes to all of the prompts and rebooted. The reboot worked fine and I was able to log into my usual desktop and backup all of my personal files to a 512Mb USB key.

However, what do I do now? Can I continue to use the laptop without doing anything else? Is it likely to fall over again? Would a fresh install be a better idea?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

I think you are fine. Whatever you could have lost you have lost already, and you now have a consistent
state of the filesystem. Definitly doing backups *before* a crash would be preferable in the future ;-)

Michael

If fsck is mentioning bad blocks it could be a physical problem. You might try running the badblock checker via fsck. IIRC, the command is something like this:

e2fsck -c -C 0 /dev/hda1

Before you do make sure you've backed up everything you need to. $HOME files, /etc config files, self-created scripts...

If it's just bad files you can probably restore them just by reinstalling the tgz files from the install discs. Mount the disc and cd into each dir one-by-one and do:

installpkg *.tgz

Again, you'll want to have made backups as mentioned above.

@ Michael - actually, I had done a backup a few days before the problem. Not entirely sure why, since I don't have a regular schedule - must have been the ol' spider-sense tingling. But I did it again because I'd tinkered with a few things...

@ dracolich - I'll have a quick read through the man pages before proceeding, I think. It is a fairly old laptop though, so physical problems could be a possibility.

My thanks to you both.