Hi, I bought a new hard drive, Maxtor 7200 RPM, ATA133, 40GB, and began using it at ATA100. I formatted my /dev/hda5 with mkfs.ext2 and mounted it under /home. I have been using this mount with the Slackware 8.0 at /dev/hda6 for several days without any problems. Two days ago I installed Slackware8.1 on /dev/hda8 and used the same device mounted to /home. (/dev/hda5) Yesterday under root privileges I attempted to delete a user's two big files, and got the following error (or warning, I don't know): root@penguen:/home/avci# rm more_than_700MB_files* EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,5)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 1083636778, count = 1 EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,5)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 1083606420, count = 1 EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,5)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 1083602068, count = 1 EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,5)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 1083602292, count = 1 root@penguen:/home/avci# ls -al total 24 drwx--x--x 2 avci misafir 4096 Jun 23 12:47 ./ drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Feb 25 2001 ../ -rw------- 1 avci misafir 36 Jun 17 17:26 .bash_history -rw-r--r-- 1 avci misafir 34 Jun 17 16:44 .less -rw-r--r-- 1 avci misafir 114 Jun 17 16:44 .lessrc -rw-r--r-- 1 avci misafir 3394 Jun 17 16:44 .screenrc However, rm deleted the files. But I couldn't understand the warning. And then, just because of curiosity I tried to copy one of the same big files from another partition to the same location, and cp gave out those: root@penguen:/home/avci# time cp /mnt/hda10/one_of_the_big_files . Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004 *pde = 00000000 Oops: 0002 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010:[<c0128240>] Tainted: P EFLAGS: 00010046 eax: cbf58000 ebx: 00000003 ecx: ca000000 edx: 00000000 esi: c1405e50 edi: 00000202 ebp: c12f1f80 esp: c14e7efc ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018 Process kswapd (pid: 4, stackpage=c14e7000) Stack: ca000240 cbe9b8c0 cbe9bb40 c12f1f80 c0130f12 c1405e50 ca000240 c0132a9c ca000240 ca000240 c12f1f80 000001d0 00000009 00000200 c013118c c12f1f80 000001d0 cbe9bb40 c12f1f80 c0128f62 c12f1f80 000001d0 00000020 000001d0 Call Trace: [<c0130f12>] [<c0132a9c>] [<c013118c>] [<c0128f62>] [<c01291a6>] [<c012921c>] [<c01292b3>] [<c0129316>] [<c012942d>] [<c0105708>] Code: 89 42 04 89 10 8b 46 08 89 48 04 89 01 8d 56 08 89 51 04 89 real 0m54.986s user 0m0.060s sys 0m7.330s And then of course I did a couple of fsck on this partition after unmounting. first one quitted after several error correcting, second fsck did segmentation fault but the last one did finish fsck. and lots of error were corrected. It might give an idea if I mount it like this #mount /dev/hda5 /home file names appear as $@#$#%#$ etc. but if I mount it like that #mount /dev/hda5 /home -t ext2 no problem seem to occur. I am thinking about whether I did something missing at the fdisk stage or formatting stage. Or is my new hard disk a dead-born? Or any other things you may notice? thank you, baris