Trouble booting!

[andyav]

Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on a problem I have?

I had XP and Redhat 9 installed on my computer at a computer shop. I haven't used Redhat very much, but when I came to use it recently it failed to load up. It came up with the following error message:

Checking root filesystem
/contains a file system with errors, check forced
Error reading block 163880 (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while doing inode scan.
/: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; run fsck MANUALLY
(i.e., without -a or -p options)

[FAILED]

***An error occurred during the filesystem check
***Dropping you to a shell; the system willl reboot
***when you leave the shell
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

I haven't used it much, so I don't know what caused this. My knowledge of linux is great, so I don't know what to do? Would it be easiest to reinstall Redhat?

any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

[kilgoretrout]

If there's not a lot of data on the drive that you want to save, reinstalling would problably be quicker. If you do that, I'd recommend using reiserfs instead of ext2 or ext3 which rh uses by default. I've found it much more resilient.

This problem is frequently encountered with ext2 or ext3 after a hard shutdown of linux. Do enough hard shutdowns and you will get the filesystem hopelessly corrupted when using ext2 or ext3. Reiserfs handles hard shutdowns much better.