I performed a hard reset and the main filesystem was easily recovered. However, the external harddrive is having some substantial problems. I tried fsck on the drive (/dev/sda1) and it reported that several inodes were corrupted, but while attempting to correct them, the computer froze entirely again.
After rebooting fdisk reported that there were no partitions. I am not trying to restore a backup but just trying to get the most recent data onto the drive. I created a new partition, ext3 and mkfs happily created the file system. However, I was able to mount the drive, but when I tried writing data to it, yes, it froze again.
I have the impression that perhaps some blocks have become corrupted on the drive, but am not certain. I ran a utility called badblocks on the device, which has not reported any errors yet, but it has been running for over 3 hours now. (fortunately without freezing up)
Is the hard drive toast if bad blocks are found? I thought that the hard drive could keep track of bad sectors and just not write anything to them, if so, how it is instructed to do so?
Any ideas?
Devlin
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