On Aug 2, 2006, at 11:12, Matty wrote: > I would also recommend running a long SMART self-test on the > drive. If you capture the SMART attributes before and after the > test, it is actually pretty easy to locate the source of the > problem (e.g., host controller vs disk disk vs. bad sector ) by > comparing the SMART attributes that were captured. If you want > additional details, check out the following article: Thanks for the URL. I'd love to run a SMART analysis, but apparently smartctl doesn't support SATA drives. At least the version that comes with CentOS doesn't (I haven't tried to rebuild it from sources - yet)! I tried accessing the drive from the CentOS LiveCD, and wasn't successful. There are two partitions on the drive, one for /boot, and the rest of the disk is managed by LVM. I was able to mount the / boot partition, but I couldn't read the grub directory due to apparent corruption (that's a bad sign right there). But maybe I can recover some of the data from the rest of the disk. How do I mount the logical partitions managed by LVM from the command line? I haven't had a chance to google for this/read the man page, so if someone has a quick synopsis handy, I would really appreciate it. Alfred