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Re: fsck needed with ext3?



Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3@msstate.edu> writes:

> For some reason I had thought that fsck wasn't needed if I was running
> ext3. I installed Woody using ext3 for my main partition, but still,
> every 32nd boot, the system runs fsck.
>
> Is there some setting I'm missing that tells it that I'm running ext3
> and don't need fsck?

You still need fsck.  Broadly, there are two particular cases where
fsck is important (in the abstract):

(1) The system shuts down unexpectedly.  Most filesystems, including
    ext2, need an fsck to get things in order.  ext3's advantage is
    that it doesn't need an fsck here, it just needs to replay the
    journal and it's done.

(2) Your hard drive is flaky, or there's otherwise hardware-derived
    corruption.  You always need an fsck if you suspect this is going
    on; running one every month or two (or every 25 reboots or so) is
    good preventative medicine, so you can catch if something bad is
    happening.

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell



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