e2fsck Looping?

[Yaego Stephen]

Helping a friend fix a computer that was having severe, weird troubles.
Reformatted (from XP) and installed Fedora. Install went ok, on first boot,
however, filesystem was READONLY for some reason.

Knew hard drive was suspect, so I e2fsck'd it over and over all night long, fall
asleep next to the computer. This morning, Fedora boots fine, login not a
problem, so I shut down and fsck it again, for kicks.

What happens:

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e2fsck keeps complaining about too many illegal blocks in inode 7.

Clear inode? Yeah

Error reading block #### (Attempt...) while reading indirect blocks of inode
##### ignore error? Yeah

Force rewrite? Yeah

Restarting e2fsck from the beginning....
/dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 contains a file system with errors, check forced.

Inode 7 has illegal blocks. Clear? Yeah

*GOTO top*

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Took a nap today and its still doing it. At least the thing is booting now!

Anyway, I read somewhere that e2fsck should not loop. Could someone please tell
me what is going on? Prepare to elaborate/simplify.

-Steve

ps: Hunter Thompson died today.