repairing filesystems

iqbala · 05-18-2008, 02:55 AM

At boot I got this message

Code:

Log of fsck -C -R -A -a 
Sun May 18 09:41:59 2008

fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
/dev/sdb3 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/dev/sdb3: Unattached inode 3571869


/dev/sdb3: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
	(i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck died with exit status 4

(this is the content of /var/log/fsck/checkfs also)

The system then actually managed to boot, kde started but I got the message

"file protocol died unexpectantly" and the same for "media protocol"

I am completely unexperienced in repairing filesystems. What should I do?

By the way, filesystem is ext3.

Thanks

reddazz · 05-18-2008, 04:24 AM

Boot from the live cd and then do Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. After that enter the command

Code:

sudo umount /dev/sda3
sudo fsck.ext3 /dev/sda3

iqbala · 05-25-2008, 03:18 PM

Ok, thanks, it worked. It was sdb3 and not sda3, but I worked that out.

Nothing seems to be missing, and the files I found in lost+found were trivial (some cookie and some setting).

But the number of errors that were corrected was very big. Just why do such things happen?

jailbait · 05-25-2008, 04:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iqbala

But the number of errors that were corrected was very big. Just why do such things happen?

The most common cause is a system crash or hard shutdown which leaves cache records in memory without being written out to the hard drive. Another possibility is hardware errors. I once installed two memory sticks which were incompatible with each other. Any buffer written from the second stick was written to the hard drive as garbage.

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Steve Stites