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forced fsck of storage partition


opvask
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I've been experimenting a bit with Compiz Fusion and the beta nvidia driver on a "test partition (sda6)" with Mandriva 2007.1, which has resultet in a couple of system freezes and a "ALT+PRTSCN+B" reboots. After these reboots the system starts with a forced FSCK of sda5, which is not a root, boot or home partition (it's a storage partition).

 

The partition is about 300 GB and therefor a forced FSCK takes at least an hour. Possibly I could change the fstab line (defaults 0 0) for the given partition to avoid this, but I'd like to understand a few things better first. I'm not sure if this would be adviced either. :)

 

1. Why does the system force a fsck of a storage disk? It does not suggest a system disk check of the root/home partition. I wonder why the need of a fsck is concentrated on the big storage (sda5). Is there a problem with this partition?

2. What would be the best way to setup the storage (sda5) in fstab? Currently I have:

/dev/sda5 /media/storage ext3 defaults 1 2

I did have defaults 1 1 before but I changed it to 1 2 after reading more about fstab. The fstab line I use now is generated by drakdisk.

3. ext3 is a journalized file system afaik. I tried reading about this online and found this:

Journalized - This means that in the event of a system crash the filesystem will only need very little work to be up and running. (So no fsck is needed!)

When using NTFS in Windows in the "old" days I really enjoyed that there rarely was any "forced" disk check on boot. Even after a hard shutdown. Shouldn't ext3 be able to work that way? Sorry, I hope someone understand what I'm talking about. English is not my main language. :(

4. Could using ReiserFS improve something in this area? Short boot time on forced fsck? Or perhaps even less occurences of fsck after a bad shutdown?

 

Sorry for the many questions about this, but I see a lot of very experiences Linux users here. I hope someone will answer a few of these questions. Especially #1 but I guees it's all kind of related. Any links to good (non expert) info would also do.

 

Thanks in advance :)

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In my experience, FSCK is needed after an unclean reboot, and ReiserFS FSCK is way faster than Ext3 FSCK, so much in fact that you may think there is no FSCK if you don't look at the text on screen.

 

Yves.

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Sounds perfect. I'll do some research about ReiserFS and possibly use that when I do my next install. IF my system is doing a FSCK it's nearly always of the "storage partition" and this process is taking a long time. It will be a tough job formating this partition with ReiserFS, since it's 300 GB and full of data.

 

I'll be testing OpenSuse tomorrow and I'll try installing it on a ReiserFS partition. Thanks for the info. :)

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I've found this relating to gentoo:

 

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Convert_Filesystems

 

and this more generic:

 

http://directory.fsf.org/all/ConvertFS.html

 

if there is a package in Mandriva that you can install which is called convertfs, then you could install this. However, I wouldn't recommend it as it seems to take 6 hours for 15GB from what I've been reading.

 

Please note, I've read about it corrupting filesystems, so if you attempt it, make sure you've got a backup

 

And if you have a backup, well, you may as well cleanly format and restore the data :P

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