The superblock could not be read fsck
 

I've got a problem where the system has detected that it did not shutdown cleanly last time and does a fsck check on startup, it gets to 70%, I think the end of phase 1, but doesn't go onto stage 2. Running fsck from a live CD gives:

How can I unfsck the disk? It's a new disk but in a old (read at least 5 years old) system. Any HD that goes near it seems to develop the click of death and slowly die. Can anyone help?

Do you get any I/O errors in the kernel messages? It the drive is clicking, then it is almost certainly bad, but it is strange that so many drives die in this box. Have you checked to see if it exceptionally hot in the drive bay?

Also, are you really using EXT2 on the drive? You might want to consider using a more robust filesystem in the future, though if you are experiencing hardware failure it probably won't help much in this case.

it occasionally makes squeaky clicking noises and shortly after the system will become unresponsive and I'll have to reboot. I've checked and it's certainly not hot in the drive bay.

I've got the /home partition (which is what fsck is trying to scan) formatted wit EXT3 but if you have any suggestions for more robust filesystems I'd like to know!

Is there any way of preventing FSCK from running on boot?