file system problem...
 

Hi,
I am using linux for 2 months and i am a newbie to it. I've got windows xp along with redhat linux 9 on my machine. Recently i've installed NTFS drivers for my linux for accessing the windows partition. The mishap happened when i am trying to copy a file from windows partition to linux. It copied almost all of the file, which is actually 700MB and at the end the system got frozen. I've restarted the system and before booting, the system prompted for file system maintenance that it had found a bad file sector in the /ext2 file system. I've typed 'yes' at the prompt, and then the letter 'y' scrolled all through the screen. This went on for almost a day and i've tried to rebooted the system again which prompted the same thing which happened before. I've tried all the ways and finally ended up reinstalling the entire redhat linux.
Is there a way in linux to prevent copying files with bad sectors? I am scared now for copying anything. Can anyone help me find the exact reason for this?

thanks,
siva

"Can anyone help me find the exact reason for this?"

I can only guess. So here are two guesses:

1. When you copy large files all of memory gets filled up with casche buffers. If you do not have swap enabled you can sometimes crash when memory is full. Check to make sure that you have swap set up correctly.

2. It is possible that you ran out of space on the partition that you were copying the file to, which should not result in a crash, but you never know. Use the df command to check the amount of space on all of your partitions.

___________________________________
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Steve Stites

First boot in single user mode with linux single command.
Then try fsck -a /dev/xxxx where xxxx is ur device name.
It will fix bad sectors and mark it as BAD.
Once sector is marked as BAD Linux will not allow to right any data on it.
For fsck umount ur partition first which u wanna check otherwise it will damage ur HDD.

Thanks,
/Ashish/Pathak.
/Pune/India.