First, when I e2fsck, a message dumps onto the console about how
there was an error with the disk (medium error, unrecovered read,
according to the SCSI messages); e2fsck reports "Error reading block
%d (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while
doing %s. Ignore error?" "%s" is sometimes "inode scan", among
other things. If I choose to ignore the error, nothing is done
by e2fsck about the fact that the block is unreadable; if I choose
to pay attention to it, this merely halts e2fsck. I'm using 1.09,
fwiw.
First of all, you probably want to upgrade to e2fsprogs 1.10. Secondly,
do "e2fsck -c" to do a badblocks check to take that block out of
service.
One of these days I'll modify e2fsck to ask the user if he or she wants
to add the badblock to the badblock list (and restart e2fsck)....
- Ted