[TriLUG] hard drive error; it wants the FSCK

[Douglas Kojetin]

hi all-

preface point #1: i've only run FSCK once, and it corrupted my entire 
drive; i lost all data, therefore, i'm not looking forward to running 
it again, but ....

preface point #2: this hard drive was in a box whose mobo had to be 
replace (>10 capacitors blew)

one of my partitions (/misc; which happens to be an entire hard drive; 
i think the drive is western digital) was giving an error about the 
/misc partition when i tried to boot the computer and asked to run FSCK 
or log in as root to remedy the issue.

to get around this, i logged in as root, commented out the /misc 
partition from /etc/fstab, and it started just fine. but after booting, 
i tried to uncomment and run 'mount -a', and got these errors:

-- from /var/log/messages (i think that was the log)
Aug 26 15:47:17 dabox kernel: EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,65)): 
ext3_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 512 not in group (block 
22020176)!
Aug 26 15:47:17 dabox kernel: EXT3-fs: group descriptors corrupted !
Aug 26 15:47:24 dabox kernel: EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,65)): 
ext3_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 512 not in group (block 
22020176)!
Aug 26 15:47:24 dabox kernel: EXT3-fs: group descriptors corrupted !

can anyone give me any advice on how to repair the disk/partition 
without causing (or causing minimal) damage to the drive/partition?

what flags?  use a boot disk instead of a booted system?  anything else?

thanks,
doug