fsck hangs my machine unpredictably

["Rob Dupuis" <robd@robd.co.uk>]

Hi All.

My one of my hard drives has a whole load of errors on it. When the machine
boots fsck is run, and when it gets to some percentage (eg 69.9%) and then I
get an msg that says 'Duplicate or bad block in use.' It then proceeds to
start a pass for duplicate and bad blocks, and it finds a *lot* of
bad/duplicate inodes. Unfortunately, before this pass can complete, the
machine hangs (ie the pass stalls and num lock etc on the keyboard stops
responding) and I have to hard reset to bring it back up.

On one occasion, I the fsck on bootup did complete, but when I ran a fsck -p
to try to fix the errors, this hung the machine in a similar way to above.
The other (3) times it always hung on the boot fsck pass and at a different
inode each time.

I'm a bit of a linux newbie, so any help on ways forward would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
Rob