Does "I/O error" mean hardware problem?

[Yuwen Dai <yuwend@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

My Debian Lenny constantly reports "disk I/O error on block xxxxxxx" when booting, then it runs e2fschk and reports some files are missing. I'd formated the partition but the problem still occurs.  The hardware is an Dell E6400 which has a Diagnostic tool.  I'd run the tool, but it said there's no error on the hard disk.  The Dell tech support says if the diagnostic tool doesn't report error, that means hard disk is OK.  So I have no proof that it's a hardware problem.  But the Linux filesystem(ext3) keeps corrupt, which is terrible.  Do you have any suggestion?

Best regards,
Yuwen