Buffer I/O error

[LinuxHippy]

I'm not sure what made this happen to my FC4 partition (hda6) after a yum install. My pc got all weird and wouldn't do another yum install or recognize my root password. Then I noticed that a bunch of processes were running (124 and I usually have 80). I didn't notice a single program that was taxing my cpu so I rebooted.

On reboot, my pc could not find grub. I booted with a Win98 boot disk and typed fdisk /mbr and that seemed to restore grub. Now when it boots, I get to grub and select FC3 (hda2). It starts up but notices an error on my FC4 partition (hda6) and tries to fix it but cannot and then drops me to a maintanence line where I type in a password. I typed in fsck /dev/hda6 and then let it repair my disk all night. When I came back, it was still repairing....so I hit CTRL-C to stop it and then typed shutdown -r now.

When it rebooted, I got the same thing. I'd like to be able to at least use my old FC3 partition which has most of the data.

This is the error I get after I select FC3 (hda2)

Buffer I/O error on /dev/hda6: logical block 0 through 12

Any ideas?

[LinuxHippy]

I saw another thread here where a similar Buffer I/O error was reported for /dev/hdc on FC4. I've been using Linux for years and never encoutered this till now-is this a bug in FC4 that's messed up my entire hda harddrive?

[LinuxHippy]

I was able to fix hda2 with fsck and boot into FC3. I used a live cd
(Slax) and umounted the harddrives. Then I checked each partition:

fsck /dev/hda1
fsck /dev/hda5
fsck /dev/hdb1
fsck /dev/hda2

This last one I had to do manually because it had a lot of errors and
could not be automated (-a)....it took about a half hour.

FC3 will boot now. I'm still without half my dive (hda6). I tried
re-installing FC4 but it doesn't see hda6. How can I reclaim hda6?

[LinuxHippy]

What caused this mess with my harddrive? I may wind up doing a low level format on my harddrive, repartitioning, and re-installing FC4. That's a lot of work and I don't want this buffer error to happen again.

Is it because I installed a certain program with yum and the program is buggy? I installed MPlayer, xine, kaffeine, and gkrellm right before I started having problems.

[LinuxHippy]

Originally Posted by LinuxHippy

I saw another thread here where a similar Buffer I/O error was reported for /dev/hdc on FC4. I've been using Linux for years and never encoutered this till now-is this a bug in FC4 that's messed up my entire hda harddrive?

Looks like it had nothing to do with a bug in FC4-someone in another forum told me to back up needed data from the harddrive because it was starting to take a nose dive. He was right, after I backed up the data I did a low level format on the drive and then started getting a bunch of file write errors on a new install of FC3. A pc guy at work told me it's a function of chemicals used to make the harddrive...some chemicals are deteriorating. Now the drive is crashed....nothing to do with Linux. I got a couple years out of it-it was a Wester Digital Caviar 20 GB 7200 RPM.

Anybody know where I can get cheap/reliable EIDE drives?