Hi, can anyone give me an example of when an fsck would repair something that the ext3 driver would not? with full "data=journal" journaling, would fsck ever need to be run if all the partitions were ext3? the ext3 mini-howto refers to "certain rare hardware failure cases (e.g. hard drive failures)" that would require a filesystem check, but doesn't go into details. thanks in advance. Regards, Tom Bassel Hybrid Servers www.HybridServers.com
Hi, On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 05:03:16AM -0400, Thomas Bassel wrote:> can anyone give me an example of > when an fsck would repair something > that the ext3 driver would not? with > full "data=journal" journaling, would > fsck ever need to be run if all the > partitions were ext3?Yes --- if you have hardware disk corruption, then there is nothing you can do to guarantee data recovery, and the best you can do is to do a full fsck to try to make things as consistent as possible. If the hardware and software are all working perfectly, then a full fsck should never be needed. Cheers, Stephen
> the ext3 mini-howto refers to "certain > rare hardware failure cases (e.g. hard > drive failures)" that would require a > filesystem check, but doesn't go into > details.Hardware problems (not necessarily failures) and bugs in the ext3 code (the reason why drivers are never really finished as far as development goes; new versions always coming out to fix some issue). Do you need to run fsck nearly as often as with ext2? No. Should you completely disable it? No. You should fsck now and then just in case something strange happened along the way which you didn't see (most blips with any filesystem aren't known until an fs checker combs the system). Right now, the default (on redhat systems) seems to be 20 mounts or 6 months with ext2. If you mount often (ie. for systems that aren't up for weeks or months on end) I'd set the max mount count much higher. If your system runs for long periods of time, then maybe setting the time interval would be better.. 6 months for any system though is long enough. Also, you could disable the fsck'ing by setting the numbers to 0 (I think *might* work), but I'd still run an fsck every so often on each partition (in your spare time of course) just as a precaution. No code and no hardware is perfect... everything's affected by something called physics :) Sorry if I sounded like I was rambling a little at times (I'm half asleep) :) -Statux