I recently installed Mandrake 10.0 official (2 days ago), got it up and running as a web server and this morning a hellacious ice/snow storm took out power lines here in the Midwest. Power was lost in the middle of the night. In the morning I tried to reboot and of course I got the improper shut down message. The file system check fails when it runs into errors, I attempt to fix the errors ....

Pass 1: Checking inodes,blocks, and sizes on /dev/hda5 stalls
error reading block10354690 (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while doing inode scan.
error reading block10354691 (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while doing inode scan.
This continues...until I get to a prompt where I'm able to get logged in but the system is very unstable and unusable.

I guess I will reinstall and start the process over again.
Is there anything I can do to to keep my installation from breaking whenever there's an improper shutdown? I have read that making a backup of /etc in something like /backup/etc when the system is in good working order, then after an improper shutdown, to copy the files from /backup/etc to /etc. This seems like a hassle and hazardous to the system.
Side Note: Problems like this hinder the advancement of linux to the general public.

Thanks in advance,
Zach

welcome.

you don't have to reinstall everything - try to repair.

use a journaling filesystem like ext3 or reiserfs or ... if you work without a ups.

make backups (use tar, cpio, rsync or whatever tool you like to use).

side note: this is no linux problem - it's human

sl mritch.

I'm currently using ext3 and when it tries to repair it has problems it fails to fix the errors. I've never done backup before, what too would work best if I want to copy from hda to hdb, 2 separate physical drives? A ups is on my Christmas list to help alleviate these problems.

this is *very* rare, but can happen. i have a few machines (w/o ups) and every of them sure had to survive a minimum of one powerfailure yet - nothing broken. cleaning up the mess and reinstalling broken things will work, but is a lot of work and quite a bit knowledge is involved here - for the future: allways have a backup handy.
since you sat it up 2 days ago, reinstalling hopefully will not be that annoying.

like mentioned there are a lot of different tools that will help you with your backup. write your own scripts or use some gui-tool.

if you have other drives and also want to gain performance also think about using raid - which is kind of having a uptodate hardcopy of your drive; comes handy if a drive dies.

as you seem new to linux, have a look at www.dltp.org for usefull documentation about various topics on the os.

sl mritch.