On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 12:13:19 -0500, Michael Wiktowy <michael.wiktowy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > All of this to lead to my questions ... > What could be causing this massive slowdown on the fsck? There didn't Bad sectors on the disk. > I know that I should just get another HD at this point (I have already > advised my friend to research the purchase of another laptop and this > is not the only problem with the laptop from what I can gather). > However, I am taking this opportunity to learn about laptop hardware > troubleshooting and if I can ressurect this machine from the dead, it > will save him a few hundred bucks that he doesn't have at the moment. If the drive supports SMART, use the smartmontools suite (in particular smartctl) to run the long self test on the drive and see if it finds bad sectors. You should also look at how many sectors have been remapped. If it is more than a handful that indicates serious problems. If you have safely copied the data off, you can also run badblocks from a live cd and write test the whole drive. That may help get some bad sectors remapped.
