With opensuse 11.1. I noticed with one of my machine that had a problem with the file system, when you boot and hit Esc for text mode and look at it briefly it will give a warning for the file system problem and tell you what to do on how to run the fsck.
@Knurpht
based on my experience, you could still use the hard-drive when offline uncorrectable sector errors occur, just need to mark the sectors as bad,
and backup is very important indeed, 
ken yap wrote:
> PS: Where in Slovenija are you? I was there in 2007.
i was there in 2006…yes, it is a very cool place to visit (but i
did’t get out to the coast)…
have a couple of good eFriends in Ljubjana, both use Linux at work, at
home and on the road (both in the IT business)…not sure, maybe they
are on AIX at work…but both use Debian on their personal stuff…
–
natural_pilot
@maill: Yes you can use the hdd. But keeping it as if there was nothing wrong with it is like knowing your car has serious problems, yet take it out on the highway. Consider allocating bad blocks as a ducktape solution. The disk needs replacement urgently !!
Modern HDs have automatic spare sector allocation, where the drive controller transparently redirects I/O for a bad sector to a spare sector on the disk (at the cost of extra access time of course). If a bad sector is visible to the outside, it means that the HD has used up all its spare sectors. To use the car analogy, it’s like taking your car out for a drive when you have already had a puncture and you have put the spare tire on. You should be heading for the nearest tire replacement centre, not driving the car for much longer.
well, for personal usage, i prefer to use my hard drive until it’s broken, and marking bad sectors could prolong your hard drive life.
just need to be prepared and backup your important data often, to another place
@Ken_yap: you now qualified for the Car Analogy World Championships !!! I will meet you there (easy to find: the other participant) 
But you’re right, I wanted to say the same thing, without getting too technical.
I always use this one for Vista: you’ve seen a car, liked it’s appearance, so you order one. On arrival it appears to have 3 wheels instead of 4, but there is a voucher stating the fourth wheel is coming early next year. After putting the fourth wheel in place it appears to be turning only one way, opposite of the other three, but the promise is there that it will be fixed. And the fix is…replace the other 3 wheels. And then they tell you they regard the design of your car as a complete failure. You probably hear that on the switched off radio, standing on a parking lot with the speedometer indicating you’re at 120 km/h
have a couple of good eFriends in Ljubjana, both use Linux at work, at
home and on the road (both in the IT business)…not sure, maybe they
are on AIX at work…but both use Debian on their personal stuff…
I’m glad you all know Slovenia so well 
@maill: Yes you can use the hdd. But keeping it as if there was nothing wrong with it is like knowing your car has serious problems, yet take it out on the highway. Consider allocating bad blocks as a ducktape solution. The disk needs replacement urgently !!
I’m working on replacement, but am dissapointed by fsck utility a little bit, since it didn’t show possible bad blocks 
However I’ll try allocated them as suggested during the thread and then plan to copy entire disk on the new one, so that I won’t have to install everything from scratch. No I wonder if you have some experience with disk clooning (if I expressed my self correctly :)) and what utility do you recommend to do this. Thanks again.
One of the interesting ads I saw in Slovenija used the fact that the word LOVE is embedded in it. I think it was for the Twingo car.
I’m working on replacement, but am dissapointed by fsck utility a little bit, since it didn’t show possible bad blocks
fsck is a filesystem checker and only detects inconsistencies at the filesystem level. If the bad block is embedded in the data blocks, fsck will not find it.
I should have told you that you should use the -f flag to fsck to force a check. fsck will skip the check if the dirty flag is not set.