Thanks Kev,

The thing is, I always use cfdisk, and i've made sure when i partitioned the drive to partition it as a Linux drive, and then format it as ext3. I guess i'm just more confused into why all this happened.. But anyway, i'll wait a few days until my backup hard disk arrives, and start from scratch on this one again.

I'll keep the post updated.

Thanks

Sorry for the late reply, been busy.

Just to clear things out, the hard drives are healthy, and working 24/7 since then. The problem was with using them through usb2/firewire. For some reason, either my usb/fw drivers didn't like me, or it just couldn't handle the pressure, the whole thing (usb/fw) died while writing large amounts of data, which corrupted the file system.

Now i've built a cheap PC, and stuck all the hard drives in there, and they work fine on ext3.

Firewire, that reminds of an incident happened in the past where, I'd connected an external drive thru; firewire interface and one day all the files and partition vanished in thin air !! Spent an 2 weeks trying recover data ~220GB !!

Later, I filed a bug with kernel driver developers and that's when I noticed there were many others who faced the same problem though, not severe as mine. Just then, I decided not to use the f/w interface until, the linux f/w driver became more stable and robust.

I still keep receiving postings from them as my email address still is in their CC list and I can see similar problems lurking around !!

Ever since then, I've been using USB and am quite happy with it as it never lead me into any data corruption.

In windoz the sceanrio was different ! It trashed 6 of my NTFS partitions while using thru' maxtor's drivers. I changed the enclosure (Vantec's NExstar3) and it works fine with windoz default usb drivers !

Anyways, its good to know that, you are doing good with your HDs !! :-)