hea Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 After unclean shutdown (usually power failure, not ML freezing or somthing ofcourse 8) ) the question arises when booting: Force integrity check? And i have to decide in seconds. Is this parallell to the windoze scandisk. Should i answer yes? I once did with little luck. I didnt manage to get back in to the system at all. This was a fresh install so i didnt bother much to find out what happend, just reinstalled. But in general what is the integrity check supposed to do , and is there any risk of loosing data connected to it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 Integrity checks are similar to what Windows does with scan disk. It used to check whether your filesystem is still intact, and find any left over files. Its not so important if you have a journalled file system, as they are designed deal with these problems. Personnally I rarely bother as use ext3 and its only a desktop PC, but I always did when I had ext2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hea Posted May 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 Thanks for your reply. I is a desktop installation with ext3 so i guess i shouldnt bother too much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 However, it will do this for several reasons.. 1. You powered down in a "nasty" way.. It wants to check everything and make sure its ok. Say YES. 2. Periodically, the OS will schedule the partition for a check (e.g. once a month). Say YES. Can't hurt. Journaled means that changes are tracked in a journaled log. It's very quick to restore any chanages if something went wrong since it only has to process the info in the journal log vs checking the entire file system. A check however will check your entire partition and isn't a bad idea once in a blue moon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hea Posted May 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 2. Periodically, the OS will schedule the partition for a check (e.g. once a month). Say YES. Can't hurt. Is this a periodic check that is set up by default when installing the system or will i have to specify this somewhere. But; as i mentioned previously i had a terrible expierience when answering yes to this on a nother occasion so i will make a backup first i guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 With ext2 is was setup automatically, I don't think ext3 bothers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qnr Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 It might vary by distribution, but ext3 (and other JFS) does (do) run the check periodically, just as ext2 does. Unless you have a very large disk and large files, generally you won't notice it, because the journalling keeps track of what files were opened, closed, etc., so it doesn't have to check every file. As far as the bad experience goes, generally a system will be smart enough to know when it can automatically fix something. At time it will come across something and prompt you as to whether you want it to force a repair which is different from force a check. This is the point where you can screw up the filesystem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hea Posted May 18, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 18, 2003 Answering yes to the 'force repair' was obviously what i did. Next time i guess i will answer no. But will the OS be happy with unrepaired errors in the file system? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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