fsck help!

[peteg1234]

A filesystem fails a check on startup.

I run fsck manually and get the message:

Error reading block xxxxxx (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in a short read ) while doing inode scan. Ignore<y>?

I get this over and over again for different blocks.
I tried No and it just takes me out of fsck and I tried YES but they keep going on and on forever.

Please help.

[tom__clancy]

did you try e2fsck? is your filesystem ext2 or ext3?

[Dolda2000]

Well, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but it seems that your hard drive has crashed. Try running "e2fsck -c" on the partition to make sure.

[peteg1234]

I ran e2fsck -c and it seems to have done something. The filesystem has come back up but changes were made during the run.

Should I worry about some of the files being corrupt?

Should I worry about the disk going completely bad relatively soon?

[genlee]

You should worry about the disk going bad soon. I suggest backing up all your data very soon. What e2fsck did is mark those blocks bad so they won't be used again.

[Dolda2000]

At the very least, download the ide-smart utilities from http://lightside.eresmas.com/ide-smart-1.4.tar.gz and let them S.M.A.R.T. test your hard drive for failures. Even if they return all positive, though, the risk might stil be there. However, when you change disk (which I guess that you should), make sure to have ide-smart running in a cron job to test your hard drive(s) for failure conditions at a regular basis. S.M.A.R.T. isn't perfect, but it's at the very least a basic precaution IMHO.