[ILUG] Testing a corrupt hard disk

[Paul Askins]

Hi,

I have 3 hard disks on my computer (two standard IDE33 and one UDMA66) and the
two standard IDE drives seem to have both died.  One is 20G for Windows with 2
partitions which have both been getting increasingly dodgy over the past few
weeks.  The other is 30G ReiserFS housing my Linux distro (except / which is on
the UDMA66 drive which seems un-affected by corruption).  I'd like to know if
there's a way to test the integrity of a ReiserFS partition and see if it's
dead or not.  
I dropped to single user at the weekend to do a reiserfsck.  This managed to
segfault on one partition (/usr) and was unable to complete the checking of
another (/usr/local).  It found errors on /home partition which it seemed to
fix, but rechecking found the same errors back again.  Possibly worth mentioning
is that I tried to boot from the the new BBC and it was unable to mount my
ReiserFS partitions, it didn't recognise them!  I know that this used to work
before.
One final point, and possibly the cause, I was using a modified BIOS from the
BP6 website for the last few months.  Could this cause hard disk corruption of
both FAT and ReiserFS?  The only unaffected disk I have was on the UDMA66
controller which has it's own seperate BIOS.

On the plus side, I did get a 16x CD writer at the weekend which helped when I
was backing up my failing hard disks :)

Any advice/help/donated hard disks appreciated,

Paul.
 
-- 
Paul Askins <:)
Email:  Paul Askins <paul.askins at adbvdesign.analog.com>
Date:   09-Jul-2001, 16:40:41

Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime?