How long for an fsck?

Pressurized · Post by **Pressurized** » 20 Oct 2007, 05:19

I shutdown bubba last night forcing fsck to run:

shutdown -Fr now

That was about 12 hours ago and the LED is still blinking. Any idea how long this will take? It's a 320GB HDD, about 50% used.

If bubba needs help, I can't give it as I can't ssh to it. Is it safe to power down on the button?

johannes · Post by **johannes** » 20 Oct 2007, 05:25

If the disk activity light isn't blinking (the red internal LED, visible through the vent bars) it should be safe to pull the power.

Could it be that fsck hangs, waiting for some user interaction?

Pressurized · Post by **Pressurized** » 20 Oct 2007, 05:56

Green LED on front is blinking slowly.

Red light through vents is on and flickering - I take that to mean there is disk activity.

If I power down, when bubba restarts will it still want to do fsck and, if it does and hangs (waiting for user intervention that I cannot give it), how can I restart it without it wanting to do fsck?

(Thanks for the lightning fast reply, by the way!)

johannes · Post by **johannes** » 20 Oct 2007, 07:00

Ok, yes, that means disk activity. I don't know how long an fsck should take, so perhaps you can bare to wait a few more hours, since it's obviously working?

Or just try to reboot it if you can't wait. I may initiate another fsck, and if it does you could try booting with the "minimal boot image", http://update.excito.net/install/minimal/. This gives you ssh access, and you could try to put things right from there.

Pressurized · Post by **Pressurized** » 20 Oct 2007, 07:14

Thanks Johannes. I will wait a while longer then try the minimum boot if necessary - that won't erase data, will it?

johannes · Post by **johannes** » 20 Oct 2007, 10:33

Nope, it won't, just give you shell access regardless of what state the disk in is.

Pressurized · Post by **Pressurized** » 21 Oct 2007, 08:05

OK, so far, so good...

From the minimal install, I ran fsck on bubba's hard drive. There were errors but they were corrected. I rebooted bubba but, even after running overnight, it was still sitting with the LED flashing but this time with the HDD light off.

I mounted bubba's hard drive so I can see all the data from the minimal install.

I noticed there was a file 'forcefsck' in the root. This is why bubba tries to do fsck on bootup. I deleted it but bubba still doesn't come up as normal.

I can scp all the data across from bubba to a backup PC so I can recover everything but it will take ages! This will include, of course, setting bubba up from scratch!

Is there anything else I can do?