Jim Reid <jim@mpn.cp.philips.com> wrote:
> A comprehensive manual can be found in /usr/share/doc/smm/03.fsck.

Ah, I'll take a look at that then.

> Or in any decent book on UNIX system administration.

I knew I shouldn't've lent my O'Reilly Essential System Administration
to someone else.

> This is an area where experience and judgement help. For example, if
> there are lots of errors, it usually means the disk is bust or on its
> way out: probably a head crash.

How many is 'lots'? We got around ten pages full of diagnostics when
running fsck after the reset.

> BTW, I have to differ with your comments about "incomprehensible
> errors" from fsck. The reports and questions it generates are clear
> enough to me, though admittedly it does help if you know how a UNIX
> filesystem and the ffs in particular is organised on disk.

You are joking, I presume? "DUP/BAD", "BAD" "EXCESSIVE DUP BLKS"
aren't all that comprehensible to me. I know vaguely how the ffs
filesystem works (or at least, I did. I've mostly forgot). fsck could
be a lot more helpful than it is.

> Sounds like you don't know what's going on. You should have let fsck
> recover all the files it could and then gone through lost+found to
> rename them to their original places. fsck can't do the latter part of
> that because the directory which held these files - ie their names -
> got mangled somehow.

Uh-uh. The first time we ran fsck, it complained about the files
and asked us whether we wanted to remove them. The second time
we ran it, it complained they were removed, and put them back
(in lost+found, since the first fsck had destroyed the directory
information). We let it do everything it wanted to.

Cheers


Jon
____
\  //    Jon Ribbens    //
 \// jon@oaktree.co.uk //