From: Dazed_75 
> Mike Bushroe wrote:
[hardware barfing]
>> I am currently typing this on the same laptop (Toshiba Satellite
>> P505-S8980), but booting off the LiveDVD, so I know that the hardware
>> is good. I can mount and read both the ext4 and Windoze partitions
>> with no problem.
> The one thing this specifically does NOT mean is that your hard drive
> is OK.

True.  Years ago, a friend of mine had his laptop unable to boot.  Almost
everything was accessible from a LiveCD, though.  The real problem was bad
sectors in /Program Files/ in hda1.  I retrieved all his
documents/music/movies/photos, he bought a new hard drive, reinstalled
Windows, and started making regular backups of all his stuff.

> That fsck returned immediately tells me it is really not
> doing/finishing the check.

fsck -f /dev/sda1 will --force a check on /dev/sda1 .  fsck usually skips
checking if a filesystem is marked "clean", meaning it was umounted
successfully.  fsck will not attempt to read every sector on the partition,
though--you'd need something like badblocks to do that  (badblocks -n if you'd
like to attempt a non-destructive read/write test, though I'd go with just
badblocks first.)  Also also, if you start getting disk errors, you will
probably see them in "dmesg | tail -n 30".  And disks have never been cheaper,
so if your time is valuable, a new disk and restoring your junk from your
backups will probably be easier than fighting with a disk full of bad
sectors.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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