Hard drive crashed!!

[Lynn Chen]

I ran 3 octaves in X windows last night. The next day, I found the
program half finished with messages saying program error. Then I reboot
the system and it won't reboot. Kernel panic. Ran fsck.ext2 to fix
the drive, there are unrecoverable errors.

What happened could be that the memory (16m) ran out and it did a lot
of disk caching and crashed the disk.

After fsck failed, I decide to reinstall Linux, all the partition
informations are still there, but when I try to format the swap 
partition, it would run forever (> 10 mins) with some occasional
cracking
sound ( not the usall noise from WD drive). I then downloaded the
Western digital WDDIAG.EXE, it stopped saying error exceeded maximum.
WD rep said if the error is <10, then low level format it.

Just let you know I learned the lesson the hard way. I would not run
more that one copy of octave at the same time any more.

guoqiang