need FSCK help!

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 10/2/06, Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> On Mon October 2 2006 12:59 pm, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> > you can run fsck on a read-only partition, it doesn't have to
> > be unmounted. Reboot into single user mode, and remount each
> > partition on /dev/sda readonly:
> > mount -o remount,ro $mountpoint
> >
> > and then you can fsck them. Good luck, hope you have backups.
>
> Re: backups, no, I don't have of / and /boot - only /home
>
> I just did a little more investigating - I opened Kdiskfree and it
> only showed sda3; sda1 is a small /boot partition and sda2 is
> swap; I guess Kdiskfree probably wouldn't show swap but,
> presumably, it's not showing sda1 because it's "Offlne" which I'm
> guessing means not mounted. Does that make sense? I have been
> noting a couple of anomalous messages during boot up recently, so
> maybe this would explain it.

/boot does not need to be mounted to boot your system.  Is /boot in
fstab?  Can you mount it manually?  If its not mounted, you can
certainly run fsck on it now.

> Anyhow, presuming my guessing above is correct, if I boot into
> single user mode and run FSCK on sda1, which is ext2, is there
> any reason that shouldn't work? How well does fsck actually do
> with bad sectors - does it attempt to read the data off of them
> and put it somewhere else? Any experience on the efficacy of fsck
> would be appreciated - I just rebuilt this machine from the bare
> drive up due to a stupid mistake last weekend - I'm sort of
> floored this is all happenning.

fsck does not normally relocate data, it only fixes what exists, to
the best of its ability.  Your drive should be transparently dealing
with bad blocks such that the data doesn't get written to them.  How
old is your disk?  Have you run smartctl on it recently?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org