Boot errors

[TonyT]

Hi,

I have had LinuxMint4 installed for 2 months and everything has been fine. But, since last night, I am now getting these errors upon boot up

Errors:
"ATA1.00 Exception Emask"
"ATA1.00 BMDMA stat"

After listing lots of the above errors it then advises me to perform a manual FSCK, which results in many of these errors:

Either 1) "Error reading block ######", "... resulted in short read" while getting next inode from scan

Or 2) "Buffer I/O error"

And after every instance of the above errors I get asked:
Ignore error? Y
Force Rewrite? Y

Followed by this question on many files:
Clear? Y

Eventually Mint will start, but then displays an error regarding a Panel and I have no MintMenu

Can anyone help me?

[muskratmx]

If you were using the system for two months with no problems. What did you do yesterday? Or What happened?

If you did nothing, no updates, no install of new software, or any hardware changes. Then the chance of an easy fix is low. It would sound like a hard disk failure to me. Or some other hardware failure.

[TonyT]

Hi muskratmx, thanks for the reply.

No, I had done/changed/installed nothing, just switched on the PC yesterday and was presented with this

Is there a scan or test I can run on the HDD?

What other hardware do you feel maybe the cause?

[muskratmx]

I'd try running some disk utilities on it. If it's a maxtor your in luck they have a diskett image on thier web site to test thier disks.

The easy way would be try the disk in another PC or try another disk in that PC.

There is hundreds of disk utilities out there. As for Linux disk utilities I haven't needed any, most my disk ether die out right or make so much noise I know their failing, since I've been using linux.