Read Only File System - after 'Checking Quotas'

[Blueberry]

Hi all, I finally managed to get a mail server working (in as far as postfix, saslauth, apache etc being set up) and after a reboot, debian takes a while 'checking quotas' then mentions some message about 'Driveready Seekcomplete error' before adding 'Read Only File System' at the end of most lines and not giving me a log in prompt.

Am real dissapointed, specially after taking so long to set things up .. anyone
able to provide some sort of solution.

Would greatly appreciate a hand.

[anomie]

It sounds like an error was detected on one of your filesystems. Boot to single-user mode and run fsck on the filesystem it indicates (or on all of them if you're not sure which it is).

That should either fix the problem or tell you what sort of trouble you're in.

[Blueberry]

Thanks for the reply, I ran fsck and was told the drive needs repairing so am going through a load of fixes but it seems many of these go to 'force rewrite' then show the end_request I/O error followed by driveready seekcomplete error.

Not sure how long this will go on for (been around 10 minutes), am hoping this doesn't mean I have a dead hardrive. Which would be strange considering I was using XP on this machine the other day without problems.