Disk Error When Starting up
 

About a week ago I started up in My Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) installation, and it started checking the disks for errors. This is nothing new as it checks every 30 mounts. But this time it found an error on my /home partition. It kept listing the errors until it eventualy shut down. It would not get past the disk check no matter how many times I tried. So I saved all my files to an external HD using Knoppix and re-installed Breezy. A few days later (i use a laptop and frequently turn of/restart) it went into another disk check. It found the same error. Eventually I want to fix the error, but for now all I really want is a way to stop the error checking. I read someware a long time ago about a program that would do this, so i know one exists.

Thanx

What kind of error? Is this the fsck error? You will probably need to boot into single user mode and run a fsck check and repair. NOTE: do _not_ run fsck against the root partition "/" if it is mounted. You should be OK in single user mode but you want to make sure "/" is unmounted. You can't unmount "/" from the standard runlevel. Another option is to grab a Knoppix CD and boot from it and run the repair.

References:
http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/fsck.htm
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/fsck.8.html

To make the problem go away permanently you should use a different filesystem. The default ext3 filesystem always caused me headaches. Now I run everything on ReiserFS and the filesystem headaches have gone away. Using ReiserFS is an option when you're setting up the partitions. Gentoo has a utility to convert a filesystem but it sounds a bit dodgy to me. Backup your data before trying that.

Thanks for the reply;

I cannot remember the exact message, but it said something about a damaged sector, or something like that. I am now running ReiserFS on my /home partition (the one with the errors) but still running ext3 on my / partition. I havent had the error since then, so it may be fixed.

How do I log in to Single User Mode?

Thanks