Using Gentoo, I did a
When I returned to the screen I found an error message coming from the compilation of "dbus" - > the update did not finish correctly.

Later, I rebooted my machine, only to be greeted by this
and e2fsck trying to run on my root partition, without sucsess.
I can do maintenance (actually I can't as root password doesn't work) or reboot.
I then chrooted into my system(so I can still mount the partition...), managed to recompile dbus (it was down to a "USE-Flag" issue that it failed) restarted again, still the same.
I then checked the emerge.log, and found that udev was upgraded from version 0.68 to 0.70. I re-emerged udev, no effect.
I then, manually did the on my root partition, and it gave me a hole bunch of errors in the style of:
This then slowly made me believe that indeed my harddisk, or rather the filesystem has been damaged.
After e2fsck finished, it said : "FILESYSTEM CHANGED" and gave me a few numbers. I rebooted, no change to be seen.

I`m writing this from my windows (I dual boot...) which is on the same drive (just a different partition)

Any Ideas, pointers, magic spells or donations for a new disk?

Is the system overclocked or you just set agressive memory timings. In the BIOS set the memory timings to fail-safe. Try running memtest86. Also buy another hard drive because Windows decays the drive to a point when you can only use just Windows on the drive until you do a low-level format. The heat of the system and the instability of memory clocked at its rated speed can give you a lot of problems during compiling all programs. A 20 inch house fan blowing in the computer case can reduce the temperature from 100 to 50 degrees F. Use compressed air to clean the insides of the computer. Do not use a vacuum to clean the insides of the computer.

I think it is better to keep the CFLAG variable with very few options as possible for most of the system related programs. Video Lan Client is very touchy of the CFLAG variable. You should not touch the global USE variable, but you can change the USE string for certain programs.

I do not use "emerge --update --newuse world" because it can literally break programs if you forgot to include a certain USE. I rather install or update programs one by one until I get stuck.

Thanks for the reply

I very much doubt that the problem "boils" down to a temperature thing.
Its winter here, and I haven't got the heating on, ie I use my PC as a heater
I haven't overclocked my PC and my memory and mobo are not even 2 months old.

However, what do you mean with windows decaying a harddisk. I mentioned that I dual boot, maybe I should have added:

I`ve been dual booting between Linux and windows for over 1 1/2 years now. During this time I have switched between multiuple linux distributions and windows versions.
The last time I did this I ran into major trouble.
I wanted to reinstall windows, so I (stupidly) deleted the windows partiton to then create a new one from within the setup. This was however not possible after deleting the partition. I recreated the partition with linux tools, and then tried to reinstall windows onto that. Worked fine untill I rebooted, to a blank screen.
to cut a long story short, Windows refused to boot from partition 4 (although it had been doing this quite happiely for quite some time)
So I moved around my partitions (this of course broke my gento installation) untill I had windows on the first. However, now I got a complainbt about my partitions not being ordered properly (they were 1,2,4,3) from a linux tool.
So I redid the whole thing, and up until yesterday, it worked....
Why did this come up after an upgrade of udev and so on?
The thing is, that I can acsess the partition from a livecd without any problems, so why can't I boot to it. Surely not because it is really broken, but because some tool is not working/or working to well and complaining about a maybe defunc disk.
Is there a way I can disable this check? So that I can still boot to a (insecure) system?

Which tools can be used for this low-level-format?

Thank you very much in advance

QUOTES:
Use compressed air to clean the insides of the computer. Do not use a vacuum to clean the insides of the computer.


why ??

incase anybody was wondering, the harddisk was defunc and I have replaced it.