Thank you, that was very helpful, however, I still have the problem after performing the actions in the mentioned above. I notice that JEmplode says "Media Check failed" after the cosole says:

e2fsk 1.19, 13 Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/hda4 is mounted

is this normal?