Good morning staff and visitors,
Does SUSE 10.0 have an application for scanning and defragmenting my Dell 4600 second internal hard drive (drive F: the primary slave drive) on which only SUSE 10.0 is installed? Yesterday Partition Magic indicated this drive currently has developed "bad" partitions!!

Sincerely,
langbein

Does SuSE still boot properly in spite of the PM warning?

If so, I wouldn't trust PM; it isn't a Linux native application. In Linux distros, there is a command-line app called fsck to check and repair Linux filesystems (see the man pages for fsck).

PS. Because *nix systems manage files differently from mswindows, defrag is not an issue.

Hello Bigrigdriver,

I appreciate your response. Yes, I have just now booted successfully into SUSE 10.0!
I was slightly suspicious of this new PM finding, but wanted to get input from those with Linux experience. The entire Ext 2 partition on which SUSE resides displays no swap or other indicators of occupancy; during 2+ months with SUSE 9.3 and immediately after the January 12, 2006 installation the Linux partition "looked" normal.
Will watch and see what happens. The portion of the F drive (~60GB) still formatted as NTFS scanned normal this morning using the scan/defrag application in WinXP.

Thanks again,
langbein

The filesystem drivers under linux resort the read/write acess to files, so the movement of the read/write head of the harddisk is minimized. Defragmentation is not necessary under Linux.

If you have bad blocks (you may, it happens) you should use fsck or e2fsck to check/repair them.

Good evening and thanks for this suggestion, linmix,
Three questions:
1.Are both commands suitable for SUSE 10? If so, what is the difference between "fsck" and "e2fsck ?" Which would be more useful in this situation?
2.Are these commands used in Linux or Windows?
3.What prompt is required for their use?

Sincerely,
langbein

1) yes. Difference? Not quite sure of the finer detail, but it appears e2fsck is a newer app based in origin on fsck. To find out about the two check their man pages ('man fsck' or 'man e2fsck')

2)Linux only (as far as I know). I don't know of any linux tools that can defrag windows partitions though.

3) I suppose any prompt will do as they are not shell specific apps. You should be root to be able to us them though. To become root type 'su' at the command line of your shell and give the root password when asked.

Hello readers,
As of 01/18/06 there seems to be a consensus that Windows "SCAN" is replaced with "FSCK" in SUSE; and Windows defragmentation is not an issue in the Linux OS.
As to the "bad" diagnosis of my SUSE partition on the second internal hard drive by Partition Magic, a monitor reviewed my partition data [located/copied at /etc/fstab] and concluded Partition Magic "can't recognize the reiserfs format." The partition data at /etc/fstab was intact and displayed no errors.
Sincerely,
langbein

Happy you found a sollution

BTW: langbein > longshanks > strider ... any Tolkien ideas in that or am I groping?

Yes. fsck is a wrapper to a specific filesystem checker. Besides e2fsck (which is a hard link to fsck.ext2), there are several file system checkers that fsck can call:
fsck.cramfs fsck.ext3 fsck.minix fsck.reiserfs fsck.xfs
fsck.ext2 fsck.jfs fsck.msdos fsck.vfat


Linux only.

I understand you want to know what are the options in command line ?
Suppose your disk is a ATA disk, and the first partition is a ext2 partition. So, fsck -t ext2 /dev/hda1 will check it's integrity.
To scan for badblocks, use the option c for a read only test or double c for a read-write non-destructive test. Something like that: fsck -cc -t ext2 /dev/hda1

Warning: The check can not be done under a live partition. un-mount it first !


Sincerely,

Hello linmix

That is a great extended interpretion of the German word langbein, which I think is literally "longleg(s)."
JRR Tolkien and my paternal grandmother would be pleased and flattered.
Langbein is the maiden name of my departed ancestor: Thekla Langbein, who married Edward Dietert in the Kerrville/Comfort region of the Texas Hill Country. They and many other immigrants setted in this part of Texas, during the mid-1800s, after their ships offloaded them on the Gulf Coast. Humidity and mosquitos quickly convinced them to "put on their traveling shoes" and move inland into the fertile, drier, and fresh water streams of the uplands known today as the Hill Country. Enough Texas history.

Appreciate your software help and interest in my lq.org user name.

Sincerely,
langbein

Thank you marozsas for this complete answer to my recent post. This is huge help in the final (I hope) resolution of the partition "bad" diagnosis from a Windows oriented Partition Magic.

One question: How do I "un-mount" my Primary Slave internal hard drive that is a SCSI drive with an Ext2 partition for Linux OS?

Thanks again,
langbein

Unmounting is done with umount /dev/hda1. However you cannot unmount your root partition as you can only unmount partitions that are not in active use.

There may be other ways to do this, but to run fsck on your root partition you'd have to boot from a live distro or rescue cd.

I do however remember reading something about a way to tell fsck to run at boot time, but don't remember the specifics. Maybe someone else (nudge nudge marozsas) can tell you.

(I do speak german and langbein does indeed mean 'longleg', but I thought longshanks was a bit more poetic )

Yes, thank you for the chance !

Each distro implements this in some way. In SuSE 9.0/10.0 if exists a file named /forcefsck then the root filesystem will be checked at the boot time.

To force a check in other filesystem, boot in single user mode (type s at grub boot options field ) and run "fsck.ext2 -f /dev/hda<n>" manually.

regards,

obrigado!

Anyone for other distros? Maybe a general sollution?