Re: bad block checking the root file system

From: Giovanni (gfalzoni_at_inwind.it)
Date: 11/24/05 

Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 09:38:21 +0100
To: Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com>

On 11/24/05 03:59, Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> Since my internal HD has suffered a minor and
> survivable head crash in the past, from which I
> recovered by the rather draconian approach of wiping
> it empty, bad block checking it (and marking the bad
> blocks unusable and presumably putting in spare
> block replacements for them), and building a new OS
> onto it, I'd _really_ like for safety to run an
> occasional
>
> e2fsck -pcc
>
> on it as periodic programmed maintenance. Of course
> there are some nasty problems about doing that:
>
> 1) e2fsck refuses to bad block check a mounted file
> system
>
> 2) the e2fsck executable is _on_ that mounted file
> system, as /sbin/e2fsck, so unmounting it makes
> e2fsck unreachable

In a similar situation I used to run badblocks. It runs nicely on a
mounted file system and it just logs if any block is not readable.

Running e2fsck does not detect bad blocks unless the unreadable block is
in the file system data structures.

Ciao
Giovanni 

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