e2fsck running for hours, printing out lists of numbers -- should I stop it?

[Allen Ziegenfus]

On the fine day of Sat, 9 Apr 2005 22:25:51 -0400
Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> said very eloquently:

> On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 11:51:23PM -0400, Allen Ziegenfus wrote:
> > I am also happy to report that e2fsck has progressed from its number
> > counting stage and moved on to telling me which files have duplicate
> > blocks and fixing these. I'm still curious if I'll be left with
> > anything usable. 
> 
> I'm pretty sure what happened to you is that your inode table got
> seriously corrupted.  Very likely, one or more blocks in the inode
> table got written to the wrong location on disk.  As a result, a large
> number of blocks are claimed by more than one inodes.  This triggers
> the "pass1b" processing, which tries to deal with this situation.

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation. Would it be reasonable
for me to kill the current e2fsck process, reinstall a newer Linux
distro and try e2fsck again? Or by killing e2fsck am I leaving the drive
in an unknown state? In that case I might just give up and re-partition
the disk. 

And is there any way to confirm a hardware failure? This drive is less
than  6 months old so I might try to get something out of my
warranty. I guess I can check the SMART utility for some info. 

As far as Debian goes, I guess there are different ideas of what
"stable" means.  

Allen