It seems every once in a while when I boot linux Gentoo it scans the harddrive and tells me there are errors. It all started after I had installed sun-j2sdk. fsck says things like problems in this block... Missing ''.''. The first time it complained about the j2sdk archives which I deleted now but it didnt solve the problem. Basically when it comes I just say yes to all of fsck''s questions and all is fine again for a while. Any ideas. Cause it really bothers me that I finally have Gentoo working after all thi work. Plus I downloaded tons of software for it and I really dont want to have to reformat it. I dont want it to be unstable either however. -CProgrammer

What filesystem do you use? If you use ext2, you may want to convert to ext3 (really easily done - just a few commands, and I''d imagine Gentoo has a way of doing even that automatically), which, because of its journalling features, makes fsck obsolete. However, I''m not sure what''s causing your problems so it could be that would only make it worse (though I doubt it). Do you ever turn off your computer abnormally (i.e., without initting to the correct runlevel or using poweroff/shutdown/login manager shutdown feature and successfully unmounting your drives)?

Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone)
Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

Had the problem again today.
Seems theres still files there from sun-j2sdk. Unmerging wont work. Probably because you had to manually doewnload files from sun and put them in the distfiles directory.
Oh and i'm already running ext3.
Any ideas?
-CProgrammer

[edited by - CProgrammer on May 4, 2004 12:23:46 AM]

The only time I''ve had any trouble with fsck was when my hard drive went kablowy.

Is it an old drive?

No its actually fairly new. Plus ive never experienced any problems until installing linux, more specifically sun-j2sdk on linux. What exactly are bad blocks?
Seems I got a few of those. Can they be fixed or only isolated.
-CProgrammer

HAs you disk been getting slow lately? If bad blicks are showing up in droves it might be a good time to make backups, jsut in case your hard drive dies.

the installation of that sun- program didn''t cause this problem.

mount you partitions readonly and do a full manual fsck on them.

Ok thanks for the warning. Although strangely theres only a problem in the linux partition. None whatsoever in the windows partition. Could it be that the harddrive works fine but isnt built for ext3. If so would reformating the partition to NTFS or Fat32 solve the problem or would the bad blocks remain?In other words is this permenent physical damage or file system damage?
-CProgrammer

bad blocks are physical problems that reformatting won''t fix

quote: Original post by grazer
bad blocks are physical problems that reformatting won''t fix

Oh man I feared the worst.
Bad, bad, out of curiosity what causes this. Can it be caused by using the computer especially as programmer or is it caused by external influences like magnetic fields or just age.
-CProgrammer

Just age.