Problem booting Redhat 9

[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 isn't great, so I don't know what to do? Would it be easiest to reinstall Redhat?

any help would be much appreciated, thanks.