Crashed cant boot now

[nimwa2]

i have mandriva 2006 and i was downloading openoffice while waiting the thing just froze.. i pressed the reboot button and it kepts saying something about corrupted inodes etc. and i couldnt startx or anything at all it just kept saying stuff was corrupted. and i even followed the repair parts where it kepts saying that.

any way to fix this if it happens again?

[techieMoe]

Can you be more specific? What are the exact error messages you are getting at boot and when you try to start X Windows?

[nimwa2]

i formated my mandriva starting over. but it would say something like

corrupted inode #134657 fix? Yes

and it would go on and on and on.. i got tired after 10minutes

[techieMoe]

Sounds to me like a harddrive problem. How old is your drive?

[nimwa2]

its a fujitsu siemens 20GB from 2001, ive had tons of problems sometimes i cant boot mandriva and i have to reinstall, when i tried to install mandrake on it it crashed during install twice.. put i installed mandriva 06 fresh last night and it worked all night i typed poweroff and went to bed next morning i boot the comp and it starts promting tons of KDE crash messages saying tons of apps couldnt load properly or something. i rebooted and then i just got black screen couldnt do anything.

possible that its broken or something?

[techieMoe]

its a fujitsu siemens 20GB from 2001...

possible that its broken or something?

That's certainly a possibility. I've not heard of that many software failures before when it didn't relate to a hardware problem. Do you have any spare drives you could plug in to test the theory? Is this a desktop or a laptop?

[nimwa2]

i have two comps runing windows with one hardrive in each cant format those tho >.< i only have a spare 10gb but i doubt i can put mandriva on that because when i install it on the 20gb it shows i have 5gb left so im gussing its size is over 10gb >.< all desktops btw.

[Wraithe]

try formating with windows and then reload using linux native.. those older drives self destruct when formatted with ext3.. i destroyed 6 or 7 drives before i found the problem(one belonged to a museum i was helping setup there server.. aaargh).. sorry about the bad news but ext2 was the last you can use with them. even older 40 gb drives don't handle ext3.. your older 10 gb or 20 gb drives definitely won't handle ext3.. windows format may help allowing linux to get a clean format but don't count on it as i've never had a reliable drive after killing them.. mind you its one way to wipe out all your info.. totally unable to recover from a drive after that..
best of luck...