Re: making bootup fsck more user-friendly
>> Unfortunately, experimenting with other filesystems will have to wait
>> until I have a spare drive. I don't know of a way to convert to other
>> filesystems on the fly :-) Also, the need to defer fsck seems like a
>> poor reason to go through the trouble of switching my home PC's
>> filesystem :-)
>>
>
> There are several hard-disk HOWTOs in the doc-linux-howto packages (pick
> your format). Its not that hard if you have a spare partition or just
> good backups. Its especially easy if you're using LVM. Without LVM I
> admit it can be a bit of a shell-game but it only takes a few minutes
> once you map it out.
I don't like to use LVM unless there is a compelling reason. It adds
additional complexity to managing your filesystems. Also there is
greater risk of problems when you use it (eg: 1 drive starts having
problems, so your entire lvm becomes unusable until you fix the
problem).
The only time I've used LVM was on work servers where they originally
had 1 mount per drive, so the network shares needed to be
moved/trimmed/etc around whenever one of the partitions filled up.
I'm sure if you use LVM a lot, then it becomes second nature, and you
end up using it everywhere due to the extra flexibility you get
(analogy: using git instead of a centralized SCM tool). But for noobs
who barely know how to work with it (me), it's easier to just use the
default filesystem :-) Beats having to refer to the manual each time
you need to fix/check something that I already know how to do without
LVM.
> I would call my home computer extremely critical. I don't want some
> bug corrupting /usr or /var and making it so that I can't boot to fix
> it. With / separate and small, the chances of it getting corrupted are
> rather small.
>
How real a problem is this? I've never had data loss problems with
ext3. Are there benchmarks/anecdotal evidence which show how much more
reliable a separate root partition is?
I would have thought that you'd only separate root part off would be:
- You like to use LVM a lot
- You have a traditional unix-like filesystem setup, with a lot of
root dirs on separate partitions/nfs shares
- You use unstable filesystems
In the rare event that root part does have a serious error (maybe
hardware/power failure/etc):
- ext3 (and ext2?) does make backup copies of the superblock.
- For all but the most serious problems you should be able to recover
by booting from another medium (cd,other hdd, etc) and running
fsck/grub/etc
- Hopefully you do have good backups in the event that something
catastrophic happens to the harddrive (if it does, your other
partitions will probably be killed at the same time).
David.
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