Re: Does "I/O error" mean hardware problem?

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

Yuwen Dai put forth on 11/21/2010 11:44 PM:
> 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?

The output from

~# smartctl -a /dev/sdX

would be helpful.

-- 
Stan