fsck

[Oliver Fromme]

tech at nano.net wrote:
 > I've got a /usr partition with some problems. During boot it fails and I'm 
 > prompted to run fsck manually. I do so and when fsck has finished it asks 
 > me to run it again, and again, and again...

If that happens, I would assume that the disk is dying.  Do
not try to fsck it, because it will probably make it worse.
Instead, use "dd if=/dev... of=... conv=noerror,sync" to copy
the disk to a safe place (i.e. other disk of same size or
larger).  Then run fsck there.

 > And now for something completely different.... If I can't get the /usr 
 > partition to work is there any way to recreate the user directories from 
 > the password file? The contents will be lost but nobody uses their folder 
 > anyway, I just need all the /usr/home folders created... I could write a 
 > script, but I thought I'd check first to see if something already exists.......

That's trivial.  In /bin/sh syntax:

# cd /home
# awk -F: '$3>999{print $1}' /etc/passwd | xargs mkdir
# for i in *; do chown $i:$i $i; done

That will create home directories for all users whose UID
is greater than 999.

Best regards
   Oliver


-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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