[Sorry for the sensational title]
I have had this laptop for three years. It ran Linux (Debian unstable) from the start and its hardware has been very unreliable: I changed hard disks twice and the motherboard thrice. My DVD drive started failing some days ago (this one is 'original', 3 years old). But I don't mind as I am not under warranty anymore... This morning the machine booted with fsck errors on my hard disk. I am not sure if I did the right thing, but I said clear the inodes, and I ended up loosing some programs(*) (du, dircolors, etc..). The day starts well isn't it? Sounds like I will have to switch disks again...
I halted the machine correctly yesterday night. I never dropped the box in 3 years. Am I just being unlucky? Or could the fact that I am using Linux on the box affect the reliability in some ways on that particular hardware (Dell Inspiron 8100)? I run Linux on 3 other computers and never had single problems with them.
How can the file system (ext3) be messed up the way it was this morning after I stopped the machine correctly yesterday? Could a hardware failure look like bad sectors to fsck?
It can. I had a drive crash on my server a couple of months ago, and I had ext3 errors show up before the syslog filled up with the ide errors. The hard disk was only 1 1/2 years old.
If the bad sectors happen where directory inodes are written, your directory structure will be turned into swiss cheese. That will *definitely* cause ext3 errors, and dump you (in Red Hat systems, at least) to a shell on reboot.
Attached the output of smartctl -a /dev/hda, whatever that helps.
Jerome
(*) I accept tips on discovering and maybe recovering which files have been taken out of my system...
You might not have any luck. After fsck -f, I thought I had saved the drive, copied everything that was left onto another machine, and found that most of the larger files had holes in them - mp3's had skips, jpegs were completely corrupted, etc.
That's what made me get a backup FireWire drive... :) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/