[TriLUG] hard drive errors & fsck

[Doug Kojetin]

Hi All-

I just upgraded to RH 8.0, and after a few times of trying to run up2date/crashing/rebooting/running fsck (manually) ... 

Being a "newbie" at some of this ... maybe someone can explain this.  My "/home" partition had a boatload of inode problems ... is this because of the "non-standard reboot"?  (hitting the reset button due to lockup)?

Anywho, I tried to install again, chose to "check drive for bad blocks" ... and discovered at least one of my partitions ("/" directory;  my /home directory has data i want to save, so i'm not formatting it ... yet) had bad blocks.  

I shortened the parition so that the bad blocks were not included, and I'm reinstalling again (block check passed with shorter partition).

Is there anyway to "fix" the blocks ... or at least flag them so they aren't used?  This was on my root directory ... I tried to have the installer check the swap partition as well, but the program itself locked up -- is that a "program" issue or perhaps there are bad blocks there as well?  

At this point, I just try to transfer all important data to another machine in hopes of starting from scratch -- but I'd like to fix the block problem.

Thanks for all your patience and help-

Doug