xfs_repair @ boot

[Dan]

Renich Bon Ciric wrote:
>> Why do you think you need to run xfs_repair ?
> When the power goes off or my PC freezes (check out the firefox freezing
> thread) I have to do a hard reset. This, sometimes, generates
> inconsistencies on the fs. 

Fair enough. I have found xfs to be extremely tolerant of power 
failures. Indeed, at my previous residence, brief power outages and 
brown outs would be a monthly occurance.

Have you tried ext3 on this system? Does ext3 get corrupted from power 
outages and hard resets?

> For example, once, I had to do an xfs_repair because
> certain /usr/share/doc directory was inaccessible and was causing all
> kinds of trouble when yum upgrade -y was run by me.

A few years ago I had a PCI firewire card in my machine, with an 
external usb2/firewire drive enclosure. Doing pretty much any kind of 
I/O would render the drive inaccessable. In the end it turned out that 
my firewire card was dodgy; when using usb2 there were no such problems.

I needed to use xfs_repair here to recover data several times before i 
got a clue. Funnily enough, I even formatted the drive with ext3 
thinking there was a problem with xfs and firewire, but the corruption 
continued.

The fireware card behaved the same on a windows machine. Do pretty much 
any I/O and ntfs would be seriously corrupted.

> xfs_repair did the job well. I would like to be able to run it without
> having to reboot to the rescue cd... Or, maybe, generating a rescue
> partition would be cool too!

This probably is not much good to you now, more for when you next 
install Fedora. However, you may wish to partition your drive(s). Put 
/home /tmp /usr /var on separate partitions. This way, you can boot or 
switch into runlevel 1 and run xfs_repair against pretty much any fs, 
but only as long as your root fs is working.