YDL partition corrupted :-(

[Andrew Schaaf]

Hi,

I happily had a working triple boot system for several days, on my 
PBG3/FW/400MHz/320MB RAM, with 20GB HFS+ (X), 6 GB HFS+ (9), 10 MB BL, 
256 MB swap, and 10 GB GNU/Linux (which is now corrupted.)

After switching from Mac OS (I think X) to GNU/Linux one day, it didn't 
load the graphical login as usual. I logged in in text mode, used "halt" 
to shut down, and rebooted. It went fine until the login, but then it 
tried to load the graphical login screen and failed. There was a small 
flicker of color somewhere, then it went back to the text login for an 
instant, then back to the graphical attempt, back to text, etc.
I did a hard reboot with Cmd-Ctrl-Pwr, it booted in GNU/Linux, and the 
same thing happened. I tried this a few times with no luck, went back to 
OS X, then tried GNU/Linux again. It worked perfectly!

All went well until yesterday. The same thing happened, but this time, 
not only did switching to Mac OS and back do nothing, but also,
far worse, after a few hard restarts, it said "FAILED" after checking 
the drive, and something like "enter root password for a shell, and run 
fsck MANUALLY.

So now what should I do?

Can I fix the partition? If can't, can I reformat it while leaving my 
other partitions (HFS+) intact? I don't have much data on any partition, 
but re-installing and copying is a pain.

And what about the future?
Twice in a week, with catastrophic results 50% of the time is not good.
Would setting the login screen to text help avoid this in the future?

Thanks,
    Andrew Schaaf