> It might be instructive to read up on e2fsck, and run it against that > partition to see what sort of errors might fall out if any. IIRC you can > have it do a read-only scan, and I would for the first pass since I don't > like to give a utility such as e2fsck a blanket pass to 'adjust' things > until I know what it might find. > if i run e2fsck on /dev/hdb2 this is my output: [root@localhost ~]# e2fsck /dev/hdb2 e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006) Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks... e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hdb2 The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>