The Monday 2005-01-10 at 07:49 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Use the SMART capabilities of your drive, for example using smartctl. It can be configured as a daemon and test your drives fully at specified times without closing or stopping the system. OK SMART enabled but I am still wondering about e2fsck.
My understanding is that although SMART will check the physical disk, e2fsck will check that the data is able to be written to the physical hdd, and of course according to the fs. So therefore eventhough I have SMART enabled, there might still be a case where data cannot be written to the hdd, resulting in a failed fsck on that partition on bootup.
fsck tests the partition logically, not physically. It can also run a badblock check (in some filetypes), but is certainly not as complete in that respect as smart.
I would like to run the e2fsck command to prevent the failure of partition checking by fsck on bootup as reding the man page on fsck it does not seem up to working on a ext3 fs.
Then just force a check during boot, by creating the file "/forcefsck". An ext3 partition will be checked to the needed level, not more. Doing a badblock check everytime is an overkill, and will not really protect your data. For a somewhat more complete check, boot from the rescue CD and test from there. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson