Hi--

I can't seem to boot Slackware 13.0 any longer. I chainload it from Grub2 and it gets into Lilo fine where I make the selection for Linux. Afterwards, it passes the BIOS data check and starts to do its thing until I get the following message:

It then starts doing a check and craps out around 28% with some type of I/O buffer error - logical block 10944980. It then repeatedly prints:

Finally it drops me down to single-user mode with the option to log in as root for system maintenance. It also gives one last message:

My question is, where do I go from here? How should I go about trying to fix this? I was logged in and booted into X only moments before this started happening. I was having a strange issue where my desktop wallpaper was reverting back to a previous image and I had changed it and rebooted to see if it would stick. After the reboot, these nasty messages started appearing...

Do you have any problems in the other OS you are dual booting with (I am assuming they are on the same HDD)? That sounds a little worryingly like a hardware issue with the drive itself, especially since it came about suddenly. It sounds like the shutdown after those changes to the wallpaper was normal (in other words, you didn't have to hard power off the system), so that shouldn't have caused any problems.

My advice would be to boot the machine up with a live CD like System Rescue CD and scanning all the partitions on the drive for filesystem errors. While this is going on, be very watchful of any error messages either from fsck or the kernel logs.

If you get errors when running from the live CD, there is a very good chance there is a hardware problem at fault, or at the very least, some serious corruption.

No, this hard drive is attached to an eSata cable so it's independent of my internal HDDs. I use Grub2 (which was the default for my Ubuntu install) to boot it. I'm assuming I can run the fsck from within Ubuntu, correct? That way I don't need to use any type of System Rescue CD.

Do I just run:

???

Fixed it (for the time being) by running:

Now it boots without any problems. I've rebooted a couple of times and can't seem to reproduce the problem. Hope it doesn't start popping up again and again. But if it's a hardware failure, that will more than likely be the case.

You can find some information about what happened on your drive. Sometimes it is helpful.

man smartctl