Importance of FSCK Utility
No one can predict when the system will get crash or your filesystem gets corrupt and if it happens then you may lose all of your valuable data from your hard drive. If you found that your filesystem creates such inconsistency then it is always run fsck to check the integrity, and this can be completed by using the special command called “fsck”(Filesystem consistency check). You can run this command manually or can start at the boot times.
You will need to run “fsck” on the following situation occurs
1.Taking a backup of your filesystem
2. Files on your system become corrupt
3. To do the consistency check
Ex:1 To run fsck on the filesystem
Syntax:
#fsck <filesystem> or fsck <mount point dir>
Note: To run fsck on a filesystem, the filesystem should be in the unmounted state and inactive, You should never run fsck on the mounted partition doing so would corrupt the filesystem.
First check the filesystem is in mounted or in the unmounted state by using the following command
#df -h
As you can see from the above output,/dev/sda2 is in the mounted state, now unmount this filesystem by using the following command
#umount /dev/sda2
#df -h
Now run the fsck on this filesystem for integrity check
#fsck /dev/sda2
As you can see from the output, fsck hasn’t found any errors from the /dev/sda2 filesystem.
To Repair the Linux Filesystems errors automatically
When the filesystems have more than one errors, then for each and every scan fsck will ask the confirmation before it proceeds to repair all the errors, apply -y option with the fsck command to do the check and repair automatically.
#fsck -y /dev/sda2
Running fsck on the mounted partition:
If you run the fsck on the active partition then the file system will go to the corrupted state,
Understanding fsck exit codes
While running the fsck, we may get some error codes, below are some of the important error codes we will get after the execution
0 =No errors 1 =File system error corrected 2 = System should be rebooted 4 = File system error left uncorrected 16 = syntax error 32 = Checking cancelled by the user
To check the fsck error codes, run the following command after fsck,
#fsck /dev/sda2 #echo $?
The above command will produce some error code after the execution of fsck command
As you can see from the above output echo $? command produced “0” error code which says there is no error found on the fsck scan.
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To check the filesystem only for errors and don’t repair
When you want to scan only for the errors and you don’t want to repair, then run the below command with -n option
#fsck -n /dev/sda2
The above command will scan only for the errors.
To run the fsck only on Unmounted partitions
When you are not sure about the mounted and unmounted partition details, run the below command, this will run fsck only on the unmounted partitions, when fsck detected any mounted partitions while running it will skip running on that partitions.
#fsck -M
To run a fsck check on all the available partitions
To do a filesystem check on all partitions(including root partition), run the following command with -A option
#fsck -A
A = Run fsck on all the available paritions
if you want to skip running fsck on the root(/) partition, then add the -R option with fsck as shown below,
#fsck -AR
The above command skips running fsck on the “/”(root) partition and it runs on all the remaining partitions.
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