[Nottingham] Hard disk problem

[David Aldred]

Had a problem this morning - the PC wouldn't complete the boot sequence 
because it was grinding to a halt in the middle of a filesystem check, forced 
because the filesystem in question had not been checked in 30 boots.  The 
filesystem concerned is a Linux partition (hdb5) on a HDD which also contains 
a Windows partition.

Having little time to sort anything out before leaving for work, I took the 
power lead out of the HDD in question, accepted Mandrake's offer to use Disk 
Maintenance mode when it couldn't find the disk, commented out the relevant 
entry in /etc/fstab, then rebooted - it runs happily without the second HDD.

Got back this evening, reconnected the second HDD, booted, opened a console 
and ran fsck -c /dev/hdb5  The first line of output reads:

Checking for bad blocks (read-only test):   nnnnnnnn/  5929985

In the first ten minutes, nnnnnnn went from 0 to around 4900000; half an hour 
on it's just reached 5236867, and appears to be increasing by about 2 every 
20 seconds or so.  At that rate, it's going to take a looooong time to 
complete!

Other than giving up and dumping the HDD immediately, is there any quicker way 
of dealing with this?  I'd not mind leaving it to it for few days to see if 
it gets there, but it's also slowing everything else on the system, sometimes 
to the extent that everything stops for 15 seconds at a time - which is a 
real pain in the middle of typing something!

-- 
David Aldred