[ILUG] Major Boot Disaster FC1

[Niall O Broin]

On Saturday 24 April 2004, lists2004 at utvinternet.com (Frank Murphy)
wrote:

>5yr old turned off ups (it was making noise)

Not very uniterruptible then, was it?  :-(

>/store01: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
>         (i.e., without -a or -p options)
>/boot: 34/26194 files (0.0% non-contiguous) , 9650/104388 blocks
>                                                         [FAILED]
>
>*** An error occurred during the file system check
>*** Dropping you to shell: the system will reboot
>*** When you leave the shell.
>Give root password for maintenance
>(or type Control-D to continue):
>
>
>
>Once root pw is entered,
>what's the best plan of action?
>I don't want to lose data if possible.

For normal human beings, the only thing to do is

e2fsck -f -y /store01
e2fsck -f -y /boot

The above tells e2fsck to check the filesystems, whether it thinks they
need checking or not, and to answer y to all questions. There is a small
risk with doing that, as perhaps it might detroy data. However, if
e2fsck's best guess at what to do with filesystem corruption is not
correct, youi're into needing someone who can debug filesystems. Such
people are rather rare. (Yes, I know about debugfs. I've even used it
once, though I can't remember why. But if e2fsck can't fix a filesystem,
I certainly won't be able to fix it with debugfs)


BTW I find this rather interesting - here's Frank with a journalling
filesystem which suffered an unplanned poweroff, one of the things with
which a jfs should cope better than a non jfs - but it didn't. Of
course, perhaps the damage would have been much worse without a jfs.



Niall