okay....  I ran fsck /dev/sda1 but it comes back with

  fsck.ext2: unable to set superblock flags on ubuntu

ext 2? that's not right. I think it is ext 4.... maybe 3
so I sat here and thought I would try fsck.ext4 and it is a program..... hmmmmm so it says that some group ddescriptors are wong and I have it fix them. then it checks some things (inodes, blocks, and sizes; directory structure,; directory conectivity; reference counts; and finally summary information). then it asks if it should fix the wrong free block count for group 0, then group 1, then group 2....... and it goes up to about group 100 (some groups are okay), then it  just starts scrolls up into oblivion with a bunch of numbers surrounded by brackets and separated by dashes. No matter which fsck I use  (ext2,3,or4) it is the same.

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Technomage Hawke <technomage.hawke@gmail.com> wrote:
ah, yeah that one too.
there are so many test tools these days. :)

-eric


On Feb 18, 2012, at 10:28 AM, Matt Graham wrote:

>> technomage.hawke@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> now I remember what the other tool was: hdparm. that tool will tell
>>> you what the SMART status is on the HDD.
> From: Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com>
>> It seems to me everything is good.
>> hdparm /dev/sda1
>
> hdparm won't tell you about the SMART status on a disk.  I think you may be
> looking for /usr/sbin/smartctl , which will report the SMART status for
> everything on sda if you call it with "smartctl -a /dev/sda".  However, the
> last time one of my disks died, smartctl didn't say anything was wrong until I
> started getting read errors on various sectors.
>
> Also, if you're having trouble mounting an ext23 filesystem, something you
> might want to try is to mount it using the backup superblocks.  "mount -t ext3
> -o sb=131072 /dev/sda2 /mnt/somewhere" is the canonical first backup
> superblock to try.  Or since reading the disk appears to be working, copy each
> partition somewhere, make a copy of that copy, and attempt to work on that
> copy with e2fsck and/or debugfs.
>
> --
> 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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