fsck.ext3 questions

[Theodore Tso]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:55:30AM -0400, Charles Riley wrote:
>
> Unconnected directory inode 3141911 (???)
> Connect to /lost+found? no
>
> Then further on, I got this:
> '..' in ... (3141911) is ??? (15542275), should be <The NULL inode> (0).
> Fix? no
>
> If I had not run fsck with -n, would fsck have set '..' to lost+found's  
> inode rather than <The NULL inode>?

Yes, it will set '..' to the lost+found after moving the directory to
lost+found.

> I'm tempted to run fsck and let it do it's thing, and then just move  
> things from lost+found to where they belong.
> But <The NULL inode>  output from fsck scares me a little bit.

Yeah, that's just because since you answered no to the "Connect to
/lost+found" question, the field "what should .. really be" was left
to zero.  It's not a big deal.

> The partition is 1.5TB in size, and the customer doesn't have space for  
> me to back it up =(.  So I want to make sure I understand what is going  
> to happen if I run fsck.

In general, it's always a good idea to do an image level backup just
to be sure.  Is this on an LVM?  If so, you could create a snapshot
that can act as a backup without it taking up the full 1.5TB in size.
A snapshot volume with say, 50 megabytes reserved, is probably more
than sufficient to maintain an LVM snapshot.

          		   	       - Ted