Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Monday 2005-01-10 at 07:49 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
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. Just to clarify, would a bad block be a physical defect or a logic error ie the fs thinks the physical media is bad but it isn't? Does SMART technology take care of looking after the physical state of
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. That '/forcefsck' option is a little strong but see the next paragraph for my suggestion. Why have the 'bad block' option and why will it not
[snip] the disk, bad blocks included? IF SMART doesn't check for bad blocks, then in theory fsck should check for bad blocks as logic would say writing data to those bad blocks will result in data loss? Bad block checking can be implemented on a ext3 fs with e2fsck but I wonder why the bootup fsck doesn't do a bad blocks check? mmmm, Running the following: man fsck.ext3 brings up the e2fsck man page protect my data? Surely it will make sure that data is not lost because the block has been marked as bad and therefore the data will be written to a good block?
For a somewhat more complete check, boot from the rescue CD and test from there. I was thinking more along the lines of possibly aliasing the boot fsck to e2fsck and having it run e2fsck each time the fsck is supposed to run on a partition set with the tune2fs cmd ie every 3rd mount or 15 days etc.
-- The bad block Little Helper ======================================================================== Hylton Conacher - Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org Currently using SuSE 9.0 Professional with KDE 3.1 Licenced Windows user ========================================================================