disk corrupt, can't boot

[dncohen]

I've somehow managed to corrupt the drive of my laptop, and I can no longer boot Gentoo. The boot process makes it to "mounting root..." or something like that, then freezes.

I'm on the road with just my laptop, which still boots windows. And I have an older gentoo livecd with me. Is there any way, using windows or the livecd, that I can check and hopefully repair my damaged drive?

Any help is very appreciated. Thanks.

[bjlockie]

Boot the LiveCD and run

[dncohen]

I ran fsck, or in my case, reiserfsck. And it reported that it believed there was a hardware problem. It suggested running with the -B option, which writes a file listing the corrupted blocks, and perhaps tries to fix them, I'm not sure. At any rate I was unable to run with the -B option because booting from the livecd I have no writeable filesystem mounted.

I'm a bit worried the disk is a lost cause, but still working on it. Thanks very much for the reply.

[bjlockie]

You could try reformatting it,