Fsck

[Kooldino]

How can i run an FSCK on my RH9 box? If I wait until it's booted, it will warn me not to FSCK because the FS is mounted.

I tried booting up in knoppix and running an FSCK -A, but it only took a second or so to run, so I doubt it did anything major.

[Ribbit]

Try rebooting it with shutdown -F -r now - make sure that F is uppercase!

Or if you want to try with knoppix, try fsck -a -f - and that F is lowercase (gotta love the command line!)

[spadnos]

Makes you wonder how 5kr1p7 k1ddi3z can ever get anywhere with non-GUI OSes.

- Steve

[Kooldino]

So if I do the "shutdown -F -r now" option, I can do it straight from redhat? What do those options translate to?

As for the knoppix "fsck -a -f", I can wait until it's fully loaded to do that?

[spadnos]

-F means "do an fsck on next reboot"
-r means "reboot" (versus h for halt)
now means "do it now", versus stating a shutdown time or delay.

- Steve

[Kooldino]

So what's the lower case "f" mean?

[Ribbit]

As a shutdown argument, -f means "fast reboot", i.e. don't do an fsck even if it might be needed.

As an fsck argument, it means "force", i.e. do a full check even if it probably isn't needed.

[spadnos]

So, for the shutdown command, "f" and "F" are effectively opposites.

- Steve

[Kooldino]

LOL, wow. And people have argued with me that Unix is user friendly.

[TnT]

Actually it makes sense, lower case to do one thing, upper to do the opposite. You know that the letter f/F has to do with fsck, otherwise it is stranger to have some random letter represent it. The problem is that other OSes don't take case into consideration Well OS X does sometimes and doesn't in other times...

[Kooldino]

Anytime where changing the case of a letter DRASTICALLY changes what it does is NOT user friendly.

[Kooldino]

OK, so I ran the fsck before i left work last night, so I didn't get to see the results. IS there a lot i can check?

[Ribbit]

What type of filesystem are they? If they're ext2/3, you can use tune2fs -l <device> and look for "last checked" or something like that.

[Kooldino]

[root@winchester root]# tune2fs -l /dev/hda
tune2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.



???

[Ribbit]

Use a partition number, e.g. /dev/hda1. /dev/hda is the whole disk.

mount on its own will list what's mounted where, and with what fs type. Or look in /etc/fstab.