Fixing broken filesystems

[Charles C. Bennett, Jr.]

mattg at world.std.com (Matthew E Galster) says:
> One incidence of evil and it sits there belly up
> (Tango Uniform) until I 'fix' it again..  

ignore != fix

You do regular backups, right?  Don't ignore, let fsck fix.  You
may loose the inode which may have been keeping track of a file.
maybe it was a file that was in the process of being deleted.
Then again maybe it was the inode for the bin directory on your
/usr partition.  If you've been running this system and this busted
inode has not been getting in your face, maybe you don't need it.

Does fsck give you an inode number?  find -inum from the top of the
affected filesystem will help you figure out which file has the
problem.  Can you get a copy of the file's data?

There was one afternoon when I busted the inode for /usr/lib on a
colleague's workstation and spent the next two and a half hours
pulling the files and subdirectories out of lost+found and giving them
their names back.  Thank heavens for the per-file checksums provided
by most installation tools.

And to echo my sentiment about "what" - whatever happened to "fsdb",
"icheck" and "clri"?  White knuckles anyone?

Oh! I found em!  They're in the 4.4 BSD documentation!


Hey - does anyone else have a copy of the August 1978 issue of the
Bell Labs Technical Journal?  It has cool papers in it like "UNIX
Implementation" by Ken Thompson.

ccb


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