Hard disk errors after installing on VP I486 laptop from First International Computers, Taiwan

[David Nelson <dnelson@wanadoo.fr>]

Hullo there,

After installing Linux (slink), I'm having hard disk errors such as: "EXT2-fs error (device 03:03) ext2-find-entry: bad entry across blocks - offset = 1316, inode 2852811149, rec_len = 60588 name-len = 4073".

Please read below for a rather lengthy explanation of exactly what happened. Basically, these are my questions:

Is my hard disk just plain bad?

Or would things be fixed by manually replacing dpkg? If so, could someone explain briefly how to go about it?

Or do I have to reinstall everything from scratch because my partitions are corrupted or something?

Thanks for your time and patience!


Once upon a time....
================

I have a laptop with 8 Meg RAM, Hitachi 320 Meg hard disk and floppy drive, on which Win 95 and Win 3.11 crashed very frequently. I then did a BIOS update that didn't work out and have to have the original BIOS retrieved and restored (some nice guy who was a service manager with a laptop reseller re-blew my BIOS ROM or patched it to restore the BIOS -- it's amazing the nice people you can meet on CompuServe; sent him a couple of bottles of nice wine as thanks). Windows continued to crash frequently. It was the original diskette-based version of Win 95 in French, with Service Pack 1 applied.

I decided to install Linux (slink distribution), partly because apparently it doesn't rely on the computer's BIOS and instead provides its own routines. So I used MS Backup to create a backup of the 16 Meg of core files needed to install from a DOS partition, as instructed in the installation manual document on the Debian website. I scrubbed the partitions on my hard disk, created and created a 32-Meg Win 95 partition containing just the basic system files and a folder called Linux. I then installed MS-Backup and restored the core Linux installation files. On restoring them, I ran INSTALL.BAT and followed all the stages, including creating the Linux swap partition (32 Meg) and main partition, letting the installation script check the partitions for errors. But while choosing drivers, I opted for dummy PPP after Serial PPP and was unable to proceed wth FTPing the files necessary for a small basic system. 

So I reinstalled from the Win 95 partition after resetting it as bootable, using Win 95's FDISK. The installation script failed to correctly read base2_1.tgz during the second install and subsequent attempts. During the process, the Linux swap partition was rendered bootable.

I went and formatted the diskettes again, did another backup and RESTOREd that to the laptop, etc, etc. This time I booted from a Win 95 diskette, and this time was up and running with FTPing the basic files (28 Meg) recommended in the installation script prior to running dselect, and a small X window installation. In dselect, I chose the access method, updated, and proceeded to Install. The download went OK for a long time, but timed-out at one stage, which caused a problem with dselect. An error message reported a "segmentation error". I exited dselect, logged out and rebooted.

After one or two more attempts, I got all my files and dselect's Install option proceeded to unpack. Once again, after unpacking several packages, dpkg reported a segmentation error and remounted /dev/fda3 (my main Linux partition) as read only. I rebooted, went back into dselect and continued with Install. Each time the same "segmentation error" report, but I was a few more packages down the road to completion. After several attempts, all packages got unpacked and configured. *****I'm not sure if I didn't have problems after dpkg itself was updated during the process******.

XF86Setup went just fine: plain vanilla SVGA server, etc. X came up with no problems.

I went back to dselect and FTPed a few more packages: dosemu, xabacus, abacus, joe and all necessary dependency packages. Same problems with "segmentation errors" and remount as read-only, but several attempts got those packages installed. Running X and the various other software installed seems to cause no problems, but there's a problem after a short interval when I run dselect and, accordingly, dpkg. 

I've run e2fcks to fix things, and after each unclean reboot, fcks itself forces a check on the drive to clean up.

Is my hard drive bad? Would things be fixed if I just replaced dpkg manually? Do I have to reinstall everything? Should I just scrap this cursed laptop? Are you still reading? Shall I stop here?

Thanks in advance for your patience and advice,

David