[Nottingham] Hard disk problem

[Michael Simms]

Tat sounds a lot like either bad sectors - try running badblocks on the
disc (make sure to use read only test on it, unless you have everything
backed up) and it will mark the sectors as bad and fsck should be better



On Tue, 2004-11-02 at 18:26, David Aldred wrote:
> 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!
-- 
Michael Simms - CEO, Tux Games
http://www.tuxgames.com