Re: e2fsck: HOWTO tutorial
On 20100622_022612, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 06/22/2010 12:33 AM, Augustin wrote:
> >
> >Hello,
> >
> >I must learn to use e2fsck as I am having some I/O problems on some of
> >my external drives.
> >I checked all the existing documentation everywhere I could think of
> >(including the Debian official documentation and existing HOWTOs from
> >TLDP), but couldn't find anything that is detailed and explicit enough
> >for my taste.
> >
> >I am left with some questions that I hope some of you will be able to
> >answer.
> >
> >1st, is there a way to run e2fsck in a strictly non-destructive but
> >informative way, to check the health of a drive?
> >(question asked here: http://linux.overshoot.tv/ticket/112 ).
> >
>
> The *drive*? No. e2fsck checks the filesystem data structures that
> have been written onto the drive.
>
> You need SMART to check the drive.
To OP:
But beware. Drives that have USB interface often (always?) do not have
pass thru of SMART information implemented. If your drive is USB, you
may not have the option of using SMART.
I was OP on a related thread a couple of months ago. I would say that
I abandoned trying to understand issues of checking for errors on USB
drives as a user. I did gain the impression that what I thought were
hardware errors were instead more likely software glitches in the kernel
or in loadable modules. For me, frequent running of sync seems to reduce
the error rate quite a bit. (By frequent, I mean once or twice a second.
I do this with a while loop running in a separate xterm.)
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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