Scott R. Ehrlich wrote: > Could I safely get away with booting from a CentOS 5 CD and performing a > fsck with automatic system fixing to speed up the process, or do I need to > be patient and just keep manually selecting Y for as long as it takes? Depends what's on the disk. Sounds like it's going, or has gone bad. Disks have a bunch of blocks on them that the end user can't see and they usually automatically re-map bad blocks into this region. So once you start actually seeing bad blocks that means this region is exhausted, and you have a LOT of bad blocks. Hope you have a good backup. As it sounds like you may be looking at massive data loss on that disk. If it were me, and there was important data I needed I would try to force mount the partition(in read only mode) and recover the data that I wanted and then run the diagnostics provided by the manufacturer of the disk and then RMA it. Even one bad block that is visible is enough to authorize an RMA from any manufacturer that I've dealt with in the past several years. If it didn't mount, then try a automatic fsck and pray it doesn't render the file system any more unusable. nate