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