need FSCK help!

[Claude Jones]

On Mon October 2 2006 12:59 pm, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> you can run fsck on a read-only partition, it doesn't have to
> be unmounted.  Reboot into single user mode, and remount each
> partition on /dev/sda readonly:
> mount -o remount,ro $mountpoint
>
> and then you can fsck them.  Good luck, hope you have backups.

Re: backups, no, I don't have of / and /boot - only /home

I just did a little more investigating - I opened Kdiskfree and it 
only showed sda3; sda1 is a small /boot partition and sda2 is 
swap; I guess Kdiskfree probably wouldn't show swap but, 
presumably, it's not showing sda1 because it's "Offlne" which I'm 
guessing means not mounted. Does that make sense? I have been 
noting a couple of anomalous messages during boot up recently, so 
maybe this would explain it. 

Anyhow, presuming my guessing above is correct, if I boot into 
single user mode and run FSCK on sda1, which is ext2, is there 
any reason that shouldn't work? How well does fsck actually do 
with bad sectors - does it attempt to read the data off of them 
and put it somewhere else? Any experience on the efficacy of fsck 
would be appreciated - I just rebuilt this machine from the bare 
drive up due to a stupid mistake last weekend - I'm sort of 
floored this is all happenning. 
-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA