Re: periodic fsck [Was: Re: Linux ready for the home desktop?]

["Ben Holland" <user=122@nabble.blu.org>]

 the other reason to do it is if you have disk fagmentation. fcsk will tell 
you and that is acually good to know. ext3 and riser were both very low when 
i've ran them even afer 180 days <2%. I once had windows up to 20%.... that 
was not nice. 

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Kristian Erik Hermansen < 
[hidden email]> wrote: 

> You've gotta fsck every so often to maintain good health :-) 
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/27/08, Matthew Gillen <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > Dan Ritter wrote: 
> > > On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:48:58AM -0400, Mark Hertel wrote: 
> > >> On 3/27/08, Brendan <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > >> 
> > >> But Linux does this when you've shut it down correctly. Windows only 
> does 
> > it 
> > >> when you've screwed up by turning off the power instead of an orderly 
> > >> shutdown. 
> > > 
> > > Two things: 
> > > 
> > > First, the usual criteria for deciding on whether or not to do a 
> > > full fsck is either N mounts, or T days, since the last fsck. 
> > 
> > Right, but assuming a journaled file-system like ext3, the reason for 
> doing 
> > the fsck periodically (whether you do it every N mounts or T days 
> doesn't 
> > matter) is that either you don't trust your file-system code (no doubt 
> what 
> > those BSD guys thought was the issue) or you don't trust your hardware. 
> > 
> > I think the latter is the reason most distros ship with the defaults 
> such 
> > that 
> > fsck happens periodically even if there is no reason to believe there is 
> a 
> > fault.  Most (desktop) hardware doesn't have ECC memory and such, so 
> given 
> > enough time, there is a pretty good possibility of getting a bit flipped 
> > somewhere.  If you're unlucky and it happens to be in the memory holding 
> > your 
> > file-system driver...let's just say the sooner you catch the problem the 
> > less 
> > likely you are to lose data. 
> > 
> > Incidentally, I had a partially bad memory bank once, and it just so 
> > happened 
> > that the file-system driver would /always/ get loaded into that memory. 
> > Every 
> > time I booted up I had a corrupt file-system.  I finally got wise and 
> yanked 
> > that memory stick out, and the problem went away. 
> > 
> > Matt 
> > 
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> Kristian Erik Hermansen 
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