[lug] fsck question

Hugh Brown hugh at math.byu.edu
Tue Aug 7 19:38:03 MDT 2007


karl horlen wrote:
> I just boot my system to find that one of my /usr LV
> failed a file system check.  I ran fsck on it and it
> reported that it fixed:
> 
> inode 1311957 was part of the orphaned inode list
> 
> I guess it's sort of comforting that was all it found
> wrong.
> 
> How do i figure out which file was affected by the
> fix.  I'm thinking it may have been damaged?
> 
> I can't recall when the last time i had an fsck error
> was. It's been so long I can't recall one.  Is this an
> isolated incident or something to be concerned about?
> 

Generally, if fsck can, it will reattach files in <fs>/lost+found/

I did find this page: 
http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/Ext3OrphanedInodeProblem

which says that an orphaned inode is a file that got removed while it 
was still open (or truncated while still open) and then something 
happens to prevent the orphaned inode list from being cleaned up after 
the file was closed.

If you have an rpm based system, you can do rpm -Va which will validate 
all rpm-installed software.  I don't believe /usr is supposed to have 
volatile data, so using your packaging systems validation tools should 
let you know whether or not something semi-important was damaged.  I'm 
assuming if it were really important, you'd know and be asking a 
different question.


Hugh




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