Dave Stevens wrote: > Still open to suggestion.... Run smartctl -a /dev/hda (or whatever) on the drive, to make sure that's not failing. Relevant responses include SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: and the stuff from SMART Error Log Version: onwards. If the drive is failing (and it sounds like it), you don't want to reformat, reinstall, or anything else. If the drive is fine, you really want to know what caused the problems in the first place. The two big suspects are faulty memory (run memtest86) or dodgy kernel code, probably from unusual or out-of-tree modules (have you loaded any?) If you *have* got faulty memory, you really should fix that before doing *anything* else with the drive. Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail: james@ | In a serial interface, the data bits move down a single aprilcottage.co.uk | channel one after the other, like railway trains. This is | different from the parallel interface in which groups of | bits arrive together, like London buses. | -- 'The Computer Dictionary', Jon Wedge