Date: Sun, 1 Mar 1998 10:18:18 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Keith Woodworth <kwoody@citytel.net> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: best way to recover Message-ID: <19980301101818.22449@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.980228084403.2075A-100000@mybsd.net>; from Keith Woodworth on Sat, Feb 28, 1998 at 09:17:13AM -0800 References: <19980228121737.28251@freebie.lemis.com> <Pine.BSF.3.91.980228084403.2075A-100000@mybsd.net>
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On Sat, 28 February 1998 at 9:17:13 -0800, Keith Woodworth wrote: > > > On Sat, 28 Feb 1998, Greg Lehey wrote: > >>>>> someone said that i should never run fsck on a "live" file system, >> >> Yup, that was me. >> >>>>> what do they mean by "live" >> >> Mounted. >> >> Well, that was clever after being warned, wasn't it? fsck works on >> the character device and ignores the contents of cache, so it can see >> deficiencies where none exist. If it "fixes" these deficiencies, it >> corrupts the disk. > > Then I got really lucky a few days ago. My system had had an uptime of > just over 60 days. One of my disks have started to make a high pitched > whine so I was thinking about what might be the problem with it. I was > working in an xterm and thought I'd take a gander at fsck man page. got > distracted by a phone call and typed in fsck without man and it ran and > said it found some error, want to fix? Sure I thought, realzing that I would > have to reboot. Fixed and rebooted right from the xterm. Everything came > back up perfectly. You were lucky. It probably will work if you reboot immediately, since it's then consistent. The problems are more severe if you give the system time to flush a few blocks from cache. There's also the possibility that you lost data, but it wasn't important enough to notice. > Either I got really lucky or there is something waiting to bite me > in the ass RSN. Disk still makes a high-pitched whine off and > on...think its my Western Digital, though BSD is on my quantum. The whine is almost certainly the spindle bearing. It can be annoying, and if the disk starts to wobble you can lose data, but initially the main factor is the irritation and worry. I know systems that go on for years like that. Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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