thanks for the help...
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Tony Nelson
well, the results are in.
does this mean i have 90% unchecked? and 12 uncorrectable blocks?
Yes, it seems to have given up at 12 blocks. The trick is to find what files those are and deal with them, so that the test can be run again to see what else it might find. Once the damaged files are found, you can decide whether to recover them, restore them from backup or some other source, or just delete them.
I don't know of anything specifically intended to find the damaged files. e2fsck will map out bad blocks, but doesn't (AFAIK) tell one which files are damaged. I think tar can be used to find such files, but I'm not sure. As you know of one file that has a problem, I suggest trying this command on the directory which contains that file:
# tar -cf - --ignore-failed-read /path/to/bad/file's/dir >/dev/null
Possibly -v will also be needed. In that case, the full scan should probably write the messages to a file:
# tar -cvf - --ignore-failed-read --one-file-system / >/dev/null \ 2>/some/other/volume/tarfiles.txt
I don't happen to have any bad blocks to try this on.
--
tar seems not to read files that are headed to /dev/null (?) trying cat instead. since i am working with hundreds of gigabytes... it could take awhile.
charles zeitler