Windows 2000 and disk "consistency"

[SMurf]

Hello,

Recently, ever other boot or so, I keep getting the message "One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency..." at startup. I let the test run, and it finds no problems. However, I find its sudden appearance slightly worrying. My hard drive was second-hand when I bought it two years ago, and while it has served me well over that time, I can't shake the feeling that one day it's gonna go to HD heaven.

That said, right now I believe the software is what's at fault. The layout of my system is thus:-

HDD: Quantum Fireball Plus LM 20GB IDE
Partition 1: Linux EXT2 (1020 MB)
Partition 2: Windows 2000 System (i.e. just the WINNT folder) NTFS (1020 MB)
Partition 3: Windows 98 Second Edition (For testing) FAT16 (320 MB)
(Empty space 700 MB)
Partition 4: Documents/application space FAT32 (15 GB)

The consistency check always occurs for the last partition, which currently has only 1 GB free space. Windows thinks that the first partition is actually FAT, and I accidentally mounted it like that once, although nothing was written to it and Linux still works. Linux has never complained about drive consistency, although it isn't Red Hat. Should I be worried?

Obviously, these checks were never the result of a bad shutdown.

[ober]

At less than 10% free space on the partition that it is complaining about, I'd suggest cleaning up that partition a bit and see if that helps.

[Waldo2k2]

What version of the kernel are you running? It's possible there's a bug and it's writing things incorrectly to the partition (as far as windows is concerned anyway). And consistency checks also do automatic repairing if memory serves me so it may be fixing itself everytime. Try booting into windows then rebooting into windows and see if it happens. If it doesn't, it's a problem with your linux install, if it does, it's time to toss the drive.