[vox-tech] Fsck-ing a Hard Disk Problem

[Robert G. Scofield]

A few days ago I started occassionly hearing a weird sound coming from my hard 
drive when I would launch Konqueror.  The sound came in sets of four "grinds" 
or "barks."  It was a grinding sound.  But it also sounded something like a 
dog barking four times in the distance.

I just rebooted into Linux from Windows and got an error message that there 
were uncorrectable errors on my /home partition; /hda10.  The message said to 
fsck manually.

When I fsck-ed manually the first time I got a bunch of messages that there 
were uncorrectable errors.  The messages stopped without a prompt.  "Crtl-D" 
would not reboot so I had to push the reset button.

The second time I fsck-manually I got a bunch of messages that there were 
uncorrectable errors, but I got some "ignore" and "fix" prompts.  I responded 
"yes" to the prompts.  Fsck then told me that the partition had been 
modified.  It also listed a whole bunch of "bitmap" changes.  I don't know 
what a bitmap is.  Of course there were other messages that I can't remember 
and did not understand.

Things seem to be okay right now.  I checked a few files and directories to 
see if they were still there.  But writing this message and playing XMMS are 
the first things I've really done.

So, what does all of this mean?  If I continue to hear the grinding/barking 
sound does that mean that I need a new hard disk?  Of course I really don't 
know if that sound is connected to the problem.  But how serious is this 
problem?

Thank you.

Bob