Here is my setup.

Drive 1 - 250GB partitioned into - 10GB /
220GB /home

Drive 2 - 160GB not partitioned - /IntDrv2 - Data and other stuff

Drive 3 - 80GB not partitioned - /IntDrv3 - Data and other stuff

I started having problems a couple of weeks ago when booting my system. It took forever to boot into KDE.

I then pressed ESC to see what was happening during the boot process. I found that the system had found "bad blocks" and was trying to fix them. It found a huge number of bad blocks. The first couple of times it happened the system eventually did boot up. I thought that the fsck had fixed whatever was wrong.

A few days later I bought a new HDD and wanted to replace the 80GB with the new 400GB, which I did. I then booted up my system and it didn't get passed the "fixing bad blocks" part. I even left it to run over night, finding the next morning that the "fixing" had been stopped at the 64% mark and a line informing me that the only way to reboot the system was to press Ctrl-D. It went on to say that I would have to run fsck manually.

I thought that one way to fix this might be to do a clean installation of 10.2. So I formated the 10GB / partition and reinstalled the system. Nothing doing. The installation worked but as soon as I booted normally, it went straight into reading drive 1 the boot partition and started fixing bad blocks, upto the 64% mark.

So I thought about it and figured that I would have to bypass that drive/partition. I might loose some history files from Firefox and the like, but all of my data was on the larger partition, emails, work stuff, films etc, so as long as I didn't delete/destroy that partition, that, at-least would be safe.

I re-installed 10.2, this time on the new 400GB drive, which I partitioned into a 20GB / partition and a 380GB /home partition. The installation went of without a problem. I booted up the system and the damn thing went straight into "fixing" the bloody damaged blocks again.

The only thing I can think of at the moment is to take out the drive that is causing the problem - Drive 1, and replace it with the new 400GB as Drive 1. I have another 400GB drive that I will push in, giving me a total of 960GB. Install 10.2 again, then take the "damaged" drive and plug it in as an external drive and try to get my data off it that way. Once I have done that, just delete the partitions on it and re-format the whole drive and use is it as a external backup drive.

Suggestions. Please. Good idea or too round about or is there a better/easier/safer way to get my data off that drive.

Help please.

i am very new to Linux my self and i had the same problem with one of my drives. what i did is i used ranish and then once i had used that i use fdisk to set up a partitioning my and ran the 10.3 install and installed it on the new partitioning i had made with fdisk i realize i used some tools for windows but hey it did the job and now mine works fine.

i hope it helps