hard disk failure

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

Another (NON destructive) check you may to do:
as root:
dd if=/dev/{your partition} of=/dev/null
Your HD will (most likely) be OK if it finishes without other error than 
"read beyond EOF" (or something like that)
ET 

 

Michael Havens writes: 

> Yep.... I think I had a hard disk failure. I restarted my computer and was
> presented with: 
> 
>      error: unknown filesystem.
>      grub rescue> 
> 
> I then typed 'ls' and the response was 
> 
>      (hd0) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos1) (fd0) 
> 
> which is two partitions, the swap drive, and the floppy disk
> how do I verify my suspicion of drive failure?
> funny how all this happened just as I was attempting to back it up. 
> 
> -- 
> :-)~MIKE~(-: