On 2022-08-09 07:40, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Hi, As some of you may recognize, I have been calling on the fine gurus that lurk on this newsgroup for help with issues that come up with my attempts to upgrade/install OpenSuSE15.4 on one of my systems. I was in the middle of doing some detective work on a problem I am having, when the computer I was working on, froze up and forced me to reboot the system. Upon rebooting, the system decided to run a file system check on one of my drives. Unfortunately, this file system check has now been running for over 3 days and the message on the screen only shows 2 bits of information, one the UUID of the disk drive being checked, and second, the amount of time that has passed since the file system check started. Both of these tidbits of information are rather useless IMHO. Without stopping the check I have no idea which drive corresponds to that UUID and would need something like the YaST partitioner on a Live USB stick to identify which drive it is (by comparing disk labels, names of partitions, disk sizes, with UUIDs).
You might get access to the error console, tty10. When a filesystem check takes that long, it usually means that the hard disk has hardware errors. Each bad sector is tried something like 5 or 10 times, an operation that can take a minute. If there are thousands of errors, then it takes days, and there is no purpose in that check. The only remedy is buy a new disk and try to salvage the contents with rsync (if disk is mountable) or ddrescue or dd_rescue. Running the smartctl short test should confirm this diagnosis. The long test would take too long. Yes, you should reboot the machine to a live rescue media instead, and run the testing from there. Do not wait. Waiting on a bad disk makes it worse, reducing the chances of recovering the data. It can get worse by the hour. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.3 x86_64 at Telcontar)