Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Checking and Repairing Unix File system with fsck




                                                                                                                          FSCK  
                                                                                                                          --------
          fsck is a Unix utility for checking and repairing file system inconsistencies . File system can become inconsistent due to several reasons and the most common is abnormal shutdown due to hardware failure , power failure or switching off the system without proper shutdown. Due to these reasons the super-block in a file system is not updated and has mismatched information relating to system data blocks, free blocks and inodes .

fsck – Modes of operation :

Interactive :- fsck examines the file system and stops at each error it finds in the file system and gives the problem description and ask for user response whether to correct the problem or continue without making any change to the file system.

Non interactive :- fsck tries to repair all the problems it finds in a file system without stopping for user response useful in case of a large number of inconsistencies in a file system but has the disadvantage of removing some useful files which are detected to be corrupt .

If file system is found to have problem at the booting time non interactive fsck is run and all errors which are considered safe to correct are corrected. But if still file system has problems the system boots in single user mode asking for user to manually run the fsck to correct the problems in file system.

Running fsck :

         fsck should always be run in a single user mode which ensures proper repair of file system . If it is run in a busy system where the file system is changing constantly fsck may see the changes as inconsistencies and may corrupt the file system .

If the system can not be brought in a single user mode fsck should be run on the partitions ,other than root & user , after unmounting them . Root & user partitions can not be unmounted . If the system fails to come up due to root/user files system corruption the system can be booted with CD and root/user partitions can be repaired using fsck.

fsck phases

fsck checks the file system in a series of 5 pages and checks a specific functionality of file system in each phase.

Code: [Select]
** phase 1 – Check Blocks and Sizes
** phase 2 – Check Pathnames
** phase 3 – Check Connectivity
** phase 4 – Check Reference Counts
** phase 5 – Check Cylinder Groups

Procedure
=======
1) Take system down to runlevel one (make sure you run all command as root user):

Code: [Select]
# init 1

2)Unmount file system, for example if it is /home (/dev/sda3) file system then type command:

Code: [Select]
# umount /home

3) Now run fsck on the partition:

Code: [Select]
# fsck -fyC /dev/sda3

y- Display completion/progress bars for those filesystem checkers (currently only for ext2 and ext3) which support them
C - to fix any detected filesystem corruption automatically

4) Once fsck finished, remount the file system:

Code: [Select]
# mount /home

5) Go to multiuser mode

Code: [Select]
# init 3

Additional examples
----------------------

1. Run through the /etc/fstab file and try to check all file systems in one run.

Code: [Select]
#fsck -A 


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