[Wine] Very Strange and Probably Obscure Problem

[Martin Gregorie]

On Tue, 2012-04-17 at 12:33 -0500, dimesio wrote:

> I'm more inclined to suspect the hard drive based on your description
> of the problem. The fact that reinstalling a file temporarily fixes
> the problem would be consistent with a hard drive that is developing
> more and more bad sectors over time. Both Western Digital and Seagate
> have downloadable utilities that can be burned to a bootable cd to
> check the health of their hard drives.
>
There are also a few standard ways to check a disk with built-in Linux
utilities: smartd, fsck and badblocks. These should work with disks from
any manufacturer.

If the OP hasn't installed smartd, he should consider doing so as its a
non-destructive way to check disk status and get warnings of impending
problems. Once it is installed and running, giving the command:

	killall -USR1 smartd

will cause smartd to do an immediate disk scan.

If the disk that's suspected of having problems can be temporarily
mounted on a PC as a second drive (an external USB disk dock is useful
for this if the OP has or can borrow one) it can be checked more
thoroughly by:

- running fsck against the partition(s) containing /home and /usr
  with the -f and -n options set. The -f option forces a full scan and 
  the -n option tells fsck to check the partition and report problems
  without attempting to repair them.

- running badblocks against the disk device with the -n option

Both programs should be used with the disk attached to the PC but
without any mounted partitions on the disk, i.e. if the partition(s) get
automounted they *MUST* be unmounted before running either fsck or
badblocks.


Martin