fsck!

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 27), Brett Glass said:
> Often, after a FreeBSD 4.x system has been powered down without a
> proper shutdown, the system complains of inconsistencies on the disk.
> Yet, if one runs the command "fsck -f" after it's rebooted, the fsck
> program doesn't fix the problems it finds; instead, it says "NO
> WRITE" at the beginning of each report. (It seems not to want to
> touch things unless they're unmounted.) So, the system has to come
> down AGAIN.
>
> What's the best and fastest way of ensuring disk consistency on a
> system that you're powering up after an abrupt outage? What about a
> system that powered up again before you arrived to nurse it through a
> reboot?

An fsck that fails with "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY."
should cause the boot process to stop right there and drop to
single-user mode.  Under 4.x, it will run fsck -p on any dirty
filesystems, and only if the preen returned success on all filesystems
will it continue to multi-user mode.  5.x is a bit more lenient, since
it can clean softupdates filesystems in the background.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com