Hard disk issue, problems running fsck

[jirish82]

Having some trouble with my laptop (HP Pavilion dv2000, running Ubuntu 9.04 ), keep getting hard disk IO errors, appears to be bad sectors. I've dropped to init 1 and it gives me a menu which I can choose fsck from, which runs, finds a few problems and finishes, but when I run it again the problems are still there, like its just finding them but not fixing/blacklisting them?!

So I try to go to root in init 1 and run manually, which i think should give me an option to fix the problems, but the instructions I'm finding online don't seem to work with my set up, they tell me to umount home before running fsck but that just tells me /home isn't mounted. When I try to run fsck tells me not to run it as /dev/sda2 is mounted, i umount that and fun fsck again but it just finishes instantly and says there are no problems.

What am I doing wrong?

[devils casper]

I would suggest you to boot up from LiveCD of any Linux distro and run fsck on all partitions.
If your Hard disk has bad sectors then you should use Tools provided by your Hard disk manufacturer to fix it.
Try UBCD. It has a lot Hard disk tools.

[Rubberman]

Boot a rescue/live cd/dvd/usb drive and run this command on each partition that contains a file system (/boot, /, /home, et al): fsck -c -f /dev/sdXN
where sdX is the system drive and sdXN is the partition to check. This will check for bad blocks and map them out of use for the file system. If any of them are involved with existing files or directories, you will be given some options to fix it, ignore it, or delete the file/directory. This process is usually a good idea if you need to use the system until you get a replacement drive. Hopefully you have backup copies of needed data.

[jirish82]

OK, tried UBCD, ran the hitachi fitness checker, went through the basic check without any trouble, but then I did the advanced check got halfway through and the computer suddenly powered off. Tried again and powered off again, but this time at the start.

I'm starting to get the feeling the drive is screwed I'd like to try what you are suggestion though, Rubberman, but I'm not sure what you mean by sdXN thing, could you give me some examples?

Thanks!

[devils casper]

Boot up from LiveCD of any Linux distro and execute sudo fdisk -l command in Terminal. Post output here.

[Rubberman]

I'm starting to get the feeling the drive is screwed I'd like to try what you are suggestion though, Rubberman, but I'm not sure what you mean by sdXN thing, could you give me some examples?
Thanks!

Current versions of linux give hard drives, both ide and sata/scsi, device names like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. The system drive is usually /dev/sda. The partitions on those drives are identified with a number, so the first partition on the system drive would normally be named /dev/sda1, etc. So, in my example the X in /dev/sdXN would be a, b, c, etc. The N in /dev/sdXN would be the partition number. So, for the first partition on the system drive, X would be 'a' and N would be 1. So, the device name for that partition and its associated file system would be /dev/sda1. On my system, /dev/sda1 is /boot, /dev/sda2 is the swap area, and /dev/sda3 is the root file system /.