> I just had my linux laptop lock up...not sure why, but it completely
> locked up, so i had to shut it down manually and reboot.  On the reboot
> I got the message about the drives being uncleanly unmounted and it
> prceeded to to a fsck which it then stopped and had me log in and do it
> manually.... so I did.

fsck is a file system consistency check program, analogous to the scandisk
program in windows. Whenever you shutdown your machine improperly(for
e.g. without unmounting the mounted filesystems) there is bound to be some
kind of inconsitency in the filesystem and fsck attempts to resolve this.


> I'm not to experieced with fsck or the file system itself... I have no
> idea what an inode is or what the messages are the come up during the
> scan.  It ask me if i'd like to repair my errors, I said yes to the
> prompts... fixing things is always a good thing......right?

Right. it is a good thing to fix those errors.  File information such as
owner, group, access time, modified time, disk blocks etc. is stored in an
inode in most Unix operating systems. You can refer to any good book on
Unix fundamentals to understand what inodes are and why they exist.

> So any way, it completed all it's checks and then I was able to boot up
> like  normal.  Now the real fun begins.... alot of my preferences were
> gone, and it came up with the default windowmaker desktop... fonts were
> back to defaults, my dock apps didn't load, Mozilla is missing filters,
> and several other things are no longer setup up.... can someone explain
> to me why this happend?  and how i can prevent it from happening in the
> future?

I am not sure why your windowmanager settings got changed - hard to
believe that it could be because of the crash. Which distribution and
version are you using? The latest distros(Red Hat, Suse, Debian etc. )
all give you the option of formatting partitions with a journaling
filesystem such as ext3 or reiserfs. Journaling filesystems maintain
transaction logs of all changes being done to a filesystem and are
better at recovering from crashes than non-journaling filesystems like
ext2. With a proper plan in mind, you can also migrate your existing
filesystem to a ext3 or reiserfs.


--ravi