isn't reinstalling something that happens to Microsoft Windows?
Yes. Which is why I said that reinstalling the OS is something that rarely needs to happen with *nix. But, sometimes, it may be called for. In my experience, that's most likely to occur right after it's been installed and, for whatever reason(s), something(s) got corrupted/screwed up. Instead of trying to find and fix the problems--which is certainly doable--it might just be easier to reinstall the OS.
I will reiterate--it's been like this since day ONE. it is like my hard disk is not working correctly with it. i do know the hard disk is NOT bad. it is a brand new laptop. what i do know is going on, is when i shut the system down, it is NOT unmounting the file system, therefore it is no different than had i held down the power button and forced it off. so this causes the auto-fsck to think the system was unclean and force a disk check. so long as there are no errors, i can easily skip it and go about my day. if not, i can force a recovery shell, complete the scan myself and fix any file system errors. what i cannot do, however, is let it auto scan. if i let it auto-fsck it will freeze. every. time.
Which reinforces my feeling that a clean reinstall might be the remedy here.
it took me hours to get what i got set up. it was a pain in the arse to install Star Trek Online. it was a 4.5 GB download. i am NOT about to mess that up by a reinstall.
How did you partition the disk? If you did it in the 'best practices' sort of way, you should have the OS installed on its own, separate / (root) partition, a separate partition for /home, some swap space, and perhaps some other partition(s) for data, downloads, whatever. If you did it this way, and assuming that you have not placed downloaded files on your root partition (and, therefore, won't lose those when you format /), reinstalling the OS will not affect anything in your /home partition, including STO (which I believe you're running via wine, correct? so its files are in your ~/.wine directory). If you decide to reinstall, choose to format / and NOT format /home. That way you won't lose anything except system files and software you've installed, for example, via Synaptic, that placed the files in /usr/games, /usr/local, etc. But you can reinstall those later. Any data should be on your /home partition and will be safe.
(Of course I always recommend doing a backup first. Personally, I have never lost any data after decades of doing clean installs (which I prefer when upgrading), but no one can guarantee anything. Better safe than sorry.)
is to keep the source file(s) until you're sure that they all made it to their destination intact. So instead of mv, you might do a cp, check to see that the files are there, and then rm the source files. This takes longer and requires more disk space (which may be a problem if your reason to move the files is a full disk). But it's the safest way to do it.
Plus the idea of getting CDs or DVDs shipped from the US or EU to China, could be expensive and lengthy. Plus I don't have a CD or DVD drive anyway. Even if the download took two weeks, it would still be quicker than posting discs here.
