[Tfug] e2fsck question

[Adrian]

On Monday 13 June 2005 15:42, Jim Secan wrote:
> At 03:30 PM 6/13/2005 -0700, you wrote:
> >You should be safe.  I don't see a -i option.  Did you mean -y?
> 
> Right you are: -y.  The program has been running for nearly six hours and
> appears to be only about 5% through the drive (it's a 250 GB USB drive on
> an FC3 system).  This doesn't seem normal to me, but I've never done this
> before on a USB drive.
> 

Yep.... The e2fsck seems to do an extremely intensive (and apparently 
inefficent) byte-by-byte type of check... I'm guessing that in a normal 
IDE/SCSI drive, the combination of bus speed and command reordering/caching 
speeds it up enormously, but that those nice-ieties don;t work as well in USB 
drives.

I had the same problem a few months ago with an external 100GB drive for 
backup storage. I made the mistake of doing EXT2 on it and having it 
automount at boot time... then the UPS on the server died during a power 
surge killing power... The people in the office plugged the server into 
regular power, but then called 1/2 hour later when the server "wouldn't 
boot". In fact, it was still trying to e2fsck that stupid drive... only got 
about 5% of the way in that time. Took me a while to figure out what was 
going on... (they kept saying the red light on the drive was on solid.. whihc 
I was thinking meant it was toast). Ahh... the fun of walking someone 
100miles away thru editing fstab with vi.

Adrian