The speed degradation is to be expected as the number of files being accessed simultaneously increases. Hard disk drives do not like to be accessed in parallel: every time the read/write head needs to switch cylinders you lose several milliseconds. Even if two files are on the same cylinder, or even the same track, you … Read more
I don’t have any direct knowledge or evidence, but to me, it would just be plain EVIL to not handle SIGINT. Hm. Actually, I can offer some assurance: strings /sbin/fsck | grep sig reports: sigaction Warning… %s for device %s exited with signal %d. So I’ll just take this as anectdotal evidence that the fsck … Read more
A 64 bit kernel and large quantities of RAM will allow the fsck to finish nice and fast. Alternately, there’s now an option in e2fsck that’ll tell it to store all of it’s intermediate results in a directory instead of in RAM, which helps immensely. Create /etc/e2fsck.conf with the following contents: [scratch_files] directory = /var/cache/e2fsck … Read more
The exact method depends on how you have setup luks, and if you have LVM on top of luks or if you just have a filesystem within the luks volume. If you don’t have LVM in addition to luks then you would probably do something like this. cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/rawdevice somename fsck /dev/mapper/somename # or … Read more
fsck speed mainly depends on the number of files and how they are spread in the respective directory. That said, 6 month for a fsck is absolutely absurd: it should had completed in some hours at most, especially if using xfs which has the speedy xfs_repair utility. Here you can find some fsck run at … Read more
This is stupid. I find myself answering my own question again. It says, Leaving filesystem unchanged. suggesting that nothing is changed. This actually mean that typing 1 followed by pressing enter inside the fsck prompt did not work. Anyway, the following does work: # fsck.vfat -v -a -w /dev/sda1 The above command automatically write changes … Read more
If all you want to do is avoid an fsck, adding the -f option to shutdown should help with that. shutdown -F to force fsck. tune2fs -l /dev/foo will tell you the interesting bits of information. Here’s a start at extracting just what you need: mount -l -t ext3,ext2 | cut -d’ ‘ -f1 | … Read more
If you’re attempting to run xfs_repair, getting the error message that suggests mounting the filesystem to replay the log, and after mounting still receiving the same error message, you may need to perform a forced repair (using the -L flag with xfs_repair). This option should be a last resort. For example, I’ll use a case … Read more
It’s probably in use by device-mapper. Check your device-mapper table using dmsetup table. If it’s in there, clear the mapping with dmsetup remove <name>. If not, look for errors in dmesg as well. # dmsetup table mpath0: 0 3516173232 multipath 1 queue_if_no_path 0 1 1 round-robin 0 1 1 104:0 1000 mpath0p1: 0 3516162552 linear … Read more
fsck definitely causes more harm than good if the underlying hardware is somehow damaged; bad CPU, bad RAM, a dying hard drive, disk controller gone bad… in those cases more corruption is inevitable. If in doubt, it’s a good idea to just to take an image of the corrupted disk with dd_rescue or some other … Read more