I have an Athlon 64 laptop.

I run Mandrake 10, of a non 64-bit variety. My root filesystem is Ext3

Recently, but not after any definable event, the following has started to happen:

I would boot, and everything would go normally. I would start things up, and things would be ok for a little while.
At some point, the root filesystem would mount itself read-only, and applications would start to crap out during startup.
If I went to reboot, I would get a message about a problem with the journalling, and I would have to manually power off.

Upon reboot, my system would do the following:

exts2-fs warning (device hda2): ext2_fill_super: mounting ext3 filesystem as ext2
vfs: mounted root(ext2 filesystem) readonly.
.
.
.
/dev/hda2 unexpected inconsitency: run fsck manually
failed to check filesystem, do you want to repair the errors(y/n):
(beware, you can lose data)


At this point, if I was booting normally, it would freeze. If I was booting in failsafe mode, and I pressed "y", it would find quite a lot of problems, fix them, and have to reboot immeadiately thereafter.

Also, it may not be related, but I've had a lot of trouble with K3B today (won't erase, write DVDs, or write multisession).

Thanks.

Hi Passive,

Here's what I suggest to do when you run into a file system problem: boot in rescue mode to run a full system check.

I don' t know Mandrake, but Fedora2 has a Rescue ISO. I also know Knoppix is a one disc distro that can be booted from the CD alone which is good for this type of task.

Once in rescue mode, run a file system check:

e2fsck -p /dev/hdaN

Your journal may be screwed up. I experienced that once, and just rebuilt it like this. First you drop the journal (that downgrades ext3 to ext2 without breaking anything):

tune2fs /dev/hdaN -O ^has_journal

Then you create a fresh journal:

tune2fs /dev/hdaN -O has_journal

HTH!

Thanks, I will give it a go.

Well, it worked once.

Unfortunately, it stopped working, and the next time I tried to start, it decided to delete my &%^$^%$ing home directoy. Which, of course, I was unable to back up because of the burning problems, and of course, EXT3 can't be undeleted, so I am %$#%ed.

I guess Linux isn't the OS for me. Or maybe it is now, since I no longer have any important data to worry about.

Well, after it deleted my home directory, the problem is still happening, and at this point I can't seem to ever load Linux. It always finds error, fixes them, reboots, and finds them again.
I did a search on some of the errors I was getting, and it seems like my hard drive may be failing. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Yup that looks like an HD failure. Before I left for vacation about three weeks ago, I had a system setup with Fedora 2 at work. It worked correctly for some time, but it suddenly gave me trouble when booting. It was taking a looong time on kudzu. So I reinstalled. Even after reinstalling, I still had problems. I would boot it in single mode, then do an init 3 and it would work. But I couldn't boot straight in runlevel 3 (I see and fix a lot of problems, but that one was way too weird). I eventually shut down the PC when I left for vacation. When I came back last week I powered the PC and the hard drive was making weird noises and not boot at all. Dead.

Another occurence I have seen is on my boss' laptop a few years ago. Gnome would constantly fail to load some files. We would fix the errors with a filesystem check, but they'd come back all the time on the same of different files.