I came to my computer, and was browsing on firefox, and I had just clicked something, and I looked away and firefox had crashed. I tried to start it, and looked away again. when I came back I found the computer back at the mandrakelinux login screen. I tried logging in several times, and each time it brought me back to the login screen. I restarted, and it found an error in the filesystem, and now it's saying:

"Error reading block 524373 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while doing inode scan.

/dev/hdc6: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)
Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors? (Y/N)
(beware, you can lose data)"

what should I do? I am using mandrakelinux 10.1, and it is a pretty old computer.

Well ... you HAVE lost data. I think your HDD is dieing,
and no matter whether the FS repairs (marks as bad) that
block or doesn't, you'll loose whatever was there.

Just my 2 cents.


Cheers,
Tink

you can try getting to the console and runing fsck manually but as tinkster said "you harddrive maybe dying". anyway try fsck -y "partition" like on all or the partitions you think needs repairing. its my 2 cents.

yeah... it's an old HD, and come to think of it, it was making weird noises a while before I got that message lol. is there any way I could install linux on another hard drive and then copy the remaining contents from the old hard drive onto the new one?

i say you can try. i too faced a weird hdd crashing problem today. so bad i couldn't even save the data. it was a acer laptop and the hdd crashed suddenly while the colleague was typing in msword. it plain rebooted and said c:\windows\system32\config\system not found! i though what the hell i will just replace the file with a fresh copy. couldn't find winxp cd so i booted with gentoo livecd only to find the filename system has somehow changed to sysyum, defauut and so on all over the config directory. all registry hives done about actually. i thought i would just replace all the files. it refused to let me change those files even when the fat partition was mounted rw. tired of it, i did a reboot and tried with the slack first dick, this time it couldn't find system32 what the hell! i looked out and saw a folder name system33! the subsequent reboot with a winxp bootable cd(got it somehow) resulted it not showing any of the partitions. it crashed drastically.

ok, so if I install mandrake on another hard disk, and then boot to that while both are connected, how will I access the old half dead hd?

connect it as your secondary master hdd and your new hdd as primary master hdd. boot from primary, try and mount secondary then copy data from secondary to primary as you normally would copy any other file.

ok, so it'll be in /mnt/something or other?

yes you can create a new directory under /mnt, something like hdd2 or whatever name suits you and mount the partitions there.