Policy after fsck fixes errors

Geoff capsthorne at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jan 19 09:16:37 UTC 2005


Hello,

Yesterday evening this box crashed and, for once, ext3 was
not able to recover automatically.  There was an
"unexpected inconsistency inode xxxxx has imagic flag set"
error and the system would not boot.  I fscked from my
rescue disk and I guess 20 or 30 errors were fixed by me
just selecting "y" at the prompt.

The system then booted and, so far as I can tell, the only
problem was that my firefox profile was corrupt (I have a
feeling that an old configuration got restored instead of
the current one). That was easily fixed, but I am left
wondering whether there might not be other, less
immediately detectable, problems remaining which could show
up later. Since fixing the profile I have forced another
fsck which (as you would expect I suppose), does not throw
up any errors.

I have a backup hdd (slightly out of date, my fault), which
I could turn to, but I am wondering: 

(a) Would you regard even a successful fsck in circumstances
such as these as an emergency measure, and revert to your
backup as a matter of course ?

(b) Are there any other diagnostics I could run to confirm
the integrity of my data?

TIA

Geoff




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