file system corruption

[James Wilkinson]

chris wrote:
> I am trying to figure out whats going on with a system of mine, I have a 
> fairly cheap IDE drive in it (160GB Western Digital),  but over the past 
> 2 weeks 2 of the partitions ("/" and "/home") have been corrupted.  They 
> are both formatted ext3, and one of them is the root for FC4. 
> 
> I don't see any errors in /var/log/messages, and am not sure where to 
> look.  I just want to verify the drive is going out before replacing it. 
> 
> Can anyone point me in the direction of some sw tools are out there to 
> help in diagnosing the problem?

smartctl. You may have to install the smartmontools rpm (from the base
FC4 repo).

Run
smartctl -l error /dev/hda
as root: you may need to run
smartctl -s on /dev/hda
(that's all one command to be run as root).

Also try
smartctl -H /dev/hda

smartctl -t short /dev/hda
which will do a low-level check on the disk: wait a minute for that to
run, then do
smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda
to see the results.

Fairly obviously, this assumes that the drive is /dev/hda.

Also go to
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=30
and try the manufacturer's tools.

Also try memtest86 (on the boot CD). Seriously: this looks like dodgy
memory.

My sigmonster's being sentient again.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Blessed are the pessimistic, for they take backups.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |