Bad Sector Check

[luisjpr]

Ok, im running ex3 fs on my primary partition and ex2 fs on my boot partition. sometimes my machine woun't boot and i get an error message. I suspect I have bad sectors in by boot partition and that is the cause of my problems.

Question: How do I check for bad sectors? I am aware of fsck but as foar as I know, that will only check for file system integrity (the equivalent of scandisk) and wount check for bad sectors. Is this correct?

Qestion 2: could bad sectors be the cause of the error message? keep in mind it only happnes some thimes and it is erratic and with no particualr pattern.

Thanx,

LJ

[DMR]

What exactly was the error message, and where in the boot process does it occur?
Did you read through your startup messages to see if there might be a clue there? If not, type "less dmesg" to view them.

Bad sectors could be a possible suspect for that kind of flakiness on your system. Here's an article (http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue37/tag/39.html) with some information on the issue. A serch for "bad blocks" or "grown defects" at Google (http://www.google.com) will give you more.