question about fsck failing during startup

[scar]

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hi, many thanks for your help.  but, a couple things...

Werner Schram @ 12/09/2009 04:29 AM:
> You can check the status of your hard disk with palimpsets, which is 
> available under System->administration->Disk Utility. 

i can't find that. must not be installed. i checked add/remove programs
and there is no 'disk utility'.  i also tried apt-get install
palimpsets, but it cannot find the package.  is it available only for
9.10? (i am still on 9.04)

> The fsck tool checks your filesystem consistency (do the files actually 
> exists? Are the reported filesizes correct?), but with the -c option, it 
> calls the badblocks tool to do a surface check on the entire partition 
> (not the entire disk though) by trying to read every block and see if 
> that works. You can do a read/write test with 'fsck -cc', altough I 
> don't think that should be necessary.

all right, so it sounds like fsck is just checking for data consistency.
 then if it failed and there were read errors, then that means i am
missing some data somewhere.  as i take daily backups of the system, is
it possible to find out which data has become inaccessible and restore
it? thanks
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