Surface Check on Linux?

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Wed Feb 4 19:49:04 UTC 2004


STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT) wrote:
> I lost an ext3 file system yesterday.  It was a
> single partition occupying a full 120 GB disk.
> It was mounted under /backup.  This is on a
> home network and I actually have gotten my wife
> and kids to take backups of anything they think
> is important.  The file system just totally went
> to pieces.  The data was corrupted and the file
> names were mutilated.  The system had been up
> for several weeks.
> 
> I unmounted the file system and ran fsck, after 
> about 30000 lines of errors, I figured there was
> not enough left to worry about. I ran mkfs.ext2
> and adjusted /etc/fstab accordingly.  This switched
> from ext3 to ext2.
> 
> I am now suspicious of the hard drive.  Are there
> any surface scan utilities for linux?

Well, you could have done an

	mke2fs -c -c -j /dev/whatever

to do a destructive write/read bad block scan.  You can also use the
badblocks utility ("man badblocks" for details).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
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