Error message question

[Hsin-Yu Sidney Li]

Hi,

I was in X-Windows the other day, and in the middle of running TeX and
Ghostscript, the system suddenly exited from X-Window and dropped back
to the login prompt (VT 1).  The message on VT 7 (where X runs) was:

	end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0

The system did not seem to die.  There was still the login prompt, and
I could still log in.  There were no other messages in /var/adm/syslog
or /var/adm/messages to give a clue.  I then tried to do

	# telinit s

to check the file system.  But curiously, when I got to the prompt for
root password, the password showed up on the console and nothing
happened after I entered it in (and hit the return key, of course).
Hitting control-D did nothing, and control-C just restarted the system
again.  I then shut down the system completely (kill all processes,
umount all file systems, etc.), and restarted the system.  This time,
however, telinit worked correctly; i.e., root password was not shown
on the screen, and the system dropped into single user mode.  I then
umount the root partition and e2fsck all the file systems.  Nothing
out of the ordinary came up, everything seemed to be fine.

Anybody know what this means?  Should I be worried about hardware
failure?

Regards,

Sidney Li
lih at polaroid.com