Hi all,

I have had to fix disk errors several times in the last two months with reiserfsck --rebuild-tree or reiserfsck --fix-fixable.

These are always on /dev/hda6 and involve the /opt folder as the contents of /opt are found in /lost+found.

So I have checked the disk with smartctl -t long /dev/hda and there are no problems.

Three questions.

1. Can I remove all the entries in /lost+found?

2. How do I reconcile the disk problems with the fact that smartctl says that my disc is OK?

3. Is there a definitive set of test suites that will settle, once and for all, the health of the disk?

Samac

I can't speak specifically to 1 or 2, but...

there are disk issues and filesystem issues. I assume you're talking about filesystem issues, but failing hardware can lead to an unreliable filesystem. (The same can be said for faulty memory.)

To determine if the disk is faulty, most hard drive manufacturers provide free utilities. I would download those to determine if your hard drive is still working fine.

(For good measure, I would grab memtest86 to verify that your memory's ok too.)

Filesystem issues are trickier to resolve. There are some half-measures you could take, such as going through the list of installed packages and re-installing them. If you're having stability issues or flakey behavior, this may resolve it. But the only sure-fire way is to wipe the partitions and re-install from scratch. You should be fine keeping /home, so all's not lost. I would back up /etc regularly for future reference.

Hope this helps...

Garry

Sounds reasonable, I have downloaded the aforementioned disk utilities, but they are all packaged for Windows, that gives me a problem running them. (No Windows here).

I have memtest and will run it.

I was thinking filesystem problems caused by software, probably in KDE, as well. However a full re-install sounds drastic. I will use that as a last resort.

Samac

Many thanks major.tom

I had a single dead memory address at 267.7mb, so I swapped in my spare 512mb dimm and checked that. All seems well.

I will keep an eye on it though.

It also seems like it answers my original question 2.

Thanks again

Samac

My pleasure. I hope that sorts out your problems.