What The Fsck?
WARNING: If you dont know what e2fsck is turn around and run far far away, quickly now.
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I'm quite irritated by having to just blindy say 'y' or run e2fsck with the -y parameter whenever a filesystem gets damaged without having a good resource to refer to about what I'm actually being asked to okay. I plan to put together some resources here about e2fsck and its wonderful messages.
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If you've had a heavily used filesytem, I've found adding the -D to optimise directories may have a noticible impact on performance if it has started to degrade.
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Feel free to add your own wonderful experiences.
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E2fsck Pass 1 Errors : Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
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• | Deleted inode 14 has zero dtime. Fix? |
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| This is a fairly simple error, what it means is that a file was open but deleted when the system was uncleanly shutdown. Let me explain further, you can open a file, delete it, and read and write to it even after it was deleted. This is useful for various things, but it is one thing that is frustrating in windows , when you cant rename or delete a file as it is in use. When everything has stopped using the deleted file, the system then frees the disk, this error signifies this has happened and is not much to worry about. This will however cause a number of other errors to show, which in turn, are pretty harmless.
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Other E2fsck Passes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
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Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
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Pass 4: Checking reference counts
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Pass 5: Checking group summary information
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E2fsck Example
I deliberately corrupted a small filesystem to show example harmless output of the above.
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fs1.e2fs was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
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Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
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Deleted inode 14 has zero dtime. Fix? yes
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Pass 2: Checking directory structure
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Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
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Pass 4: Checking reference counts
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Pass 5: Checking group summary information
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Block bitmap differences: -28
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Free blocks count wrong for group #0 (107, counted=108).
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Free blocks count wrong (107, counted=108).
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Inode bitmap differences: -14
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Free inodes count wrong for group #0 (4, counted=5).
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Free inodes count wrong (4, counted=5).
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fs1.e2fs: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
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fs1.e2fs: 11/16 files (0.0% non-contiguous), 20/128 blocks
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