I am running Ubuntu 9.04 on a Dell Optiplex SX280

Yesterday the system locked up, and when I rebooted I got stuff like this:

and was prompted to run fsck manually. So I stumbled my way through that, accepting the default (yes) when asked if we should force this and rewrite that, perhaps 30 or 40 times. Then I rebooted OK.

Some files got blown away, many of them in my .mozilla directory, sqlite databases containing stored website passwords and such. I think I remember seeing something containing "usb" in its name that was also damaged.

There may be other surprises lurking, but among the problems I have noticed is that when I insert a USB stick into a port, it is no longer automatically mounted, and there's nothing about in the output of lsusb, as far as I can tell:

And I have not been able to mount it manually.

So, my questions are:

Doesn't this mean there are bad sectors on my drive?

Should the drive be replaced and the OS reinstalled?

Or should I just do an OS reinstall?

Or is there a way to restore the damaged system stuff like USB support, short of a reinstall?

Or is there something else I ought to do?

Many thanks in advance.

Boot into single user mode. You can update the system.
Use apt-get to correct.
Usbutils and usbmount- if you had it- are what you need.
If the drive doesn't work with one distro or OS, doesn't mean it's shot.

I suggest booting from a live cdrom or dvd or any other media, then use smartmontools to do all the possible checks. This will bypass your fs, so it's more or less a reliable way to check for hardware errors, as long as your drives support SMART, that is.

The dmesg dump certainly looks like a hardware error, unless it's a bogus driver, and I assume that's not the case if the drive has been working for a long time on that same OS.

thanks for the advice. I didn't have quite enough clues to figure out how to repair in single-user mode, so I did something really foolish, that is, tried to remove and reinstall usbutils etc, and trashed everything royally. Could not boot X, had no network, etc. Nice move, Einstein!

So I booted from a rescue disk and manually mounted an external USB disk as well as the hard disk and copied everything essential from the latter to the former, then re-installed the OS, then restored my stuff (And took the opportunity to go from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 -- so far, no complaints.)

Ubuntu immediately warned me that the drive had "many bad sectors," so I replaced the drive, rinsed and repeated.

All told, the whole operation cost hours, but all is well.

Thanks again.

This EXACT same thing happened with me when I was having hard drive failure. As soon as I realized something was wrong with it, I zeroed out the drive with seatools. After that, I was restoring my operating system image, (stored on a usb backup drive). But, it came to a bad spot on the disk. After that, my machine froze. After I rebooted, the USB would fail after transfering aproximately 100 mb of data. I unplugged the system from the wall and removed the CMOS battery. I got nothing. I then did the same thing letting it sit for a week, and still nothing. So, I moved to another pc I had around (much slower). Finally, after 2 months I decided to plug in the PC again, and low and behold it WORKED! Now, I am back on my computer. USB now works no problems. Many people online who have USB problems have said that if they let their computer stay unplugged for a half hour it clears up. I guess mine had a capacitor somewhere that took awhile to clear. Try unplugging your PC and see if that helps the USB. I think in my case, the southbridge got confused as it handles my all bus communications. EDIT: Nevermind looks like you fixed it. COOL!