Filesystem error scare

Question

I just had a big scare when I went to reboot my main laptop and my 80GB ext3 home partition had errors...I couldn't remember my root password so I booted from a Ubuntu LiveCD and ran 'sudo fsck /dev/sda4'. There were a few errors...wrong inode counts, a few other things. I was asked several times if I wanted to correct things or 'clone' blocks with duplicate references. Most errors seemed to be in my Music/ folder which has about 2500 mp3 files. After a few passed fsck exited, and I ran 'sudo e2fsck -p /dev/sda' to double check. It said the filesystem was clean.
I rebooted, everything appears to be working, everything appears to be here...I'm worried that I might have lost some data or done strange things to my filesystem.
I do have a backup hard drive which I rsync with my home directory, but I've been lazy and the last time I did it was a week ago. Not much should have changed, just a few new tracks and some uni work which I've already handed in anyway.
Firstly, what could have contributed to this? I've been using suspend-to-ram almost exclusively so the laptop has had uptimes of up to a week...I've been installing kernel and KDE updates without rebooting or restarting. The partition is also about 75% full.
Secondly, should I worry about restoring my home partition from the backup, after recovering any new files I want to keep? Or can I just keep going and assume the only permanent damage will be a few corrupt files?
Last edited by samwise (2009-10-20 04:05:05)

Answer 1

The drive is a Toshiba MK1234GSX. Toshiba doesn't appear to make any diagnostic tools available.
I did some smartmontools tests as described here; the health check and the short self-test. Both passed. No errors are in the SMART log. I'll run the long self-test tonight, but the hard drive doesn't appear obviously defective...
edit: the load cycle count is 371619. This seems huge.
Last edited by samwise (2009-10-20 10:11:10)