reiserfs partition corrupted

[nihil]

Well, I personally don't hold out much hope of recovery, perhaps it would be wise to consider what caused the problem?

1. Slackware 11 is a 2006 distro which suggests that your HDD is older than that?

2. It is not a question of if a HDD will fail it is just a question of when. I always check the hardware first in situations like this.............the test only takes minutes compared with hours messing with OSes and Apps, only to find that the HDD is past it and you are going to have to start over anyway

3. You have been having problems with both your Slackware and Windows partitions due to lack of filespace? That tells me you are filling them too full..........I personally try to allow 20% freespace on a drive/partition to give tools some space in which to operate. OK, you don't need that much if it is just a data storage partition or drive, but I still wouldn't like to go under 10%

4. Do you have access to a Windows machine that would accept a slaved drive? I seem to recall that there is a file recovery utility that will run under Windows that will fix reiserfs problems?

5. How much RAM does your machine have?

EDIT:

Keep it simple. If that HDD is S.M.A.R.T. it can tell right away if it's dieing. For the OP....on the commandline 'ls /usr/bin | grep smart'.

Unfortunately SMART isn't................it has a detection rate of less than 60%. Anyway, manufacturers diagnostics check the SMART logs as well. Might as well go the full mile IMO.

Work at Google on over 100,000 drives has shown little overall predictive value of S.M.A.R.T. status as a whole, but suggests that certain sub-categories of information which some S.M.A.R.T. implementations track do correlate with actual failure rates – specifically, in the 60 days following the first scan error on a drive, the drive is, on average, 39 times more likely to fail than it would have been had no such error occurred.

Please remember that SMART is predictive, whereas the manufacturer's diagnostic is analytical.