I'm beginning to think I'm having some disk hardware problems. I was having sporadic problems with the /var directory, (hardware locatlon /dev/hda5). I ran fsck on it, and had a huge number of disconnected inodes. It seemed to have cleaned them up, and put them in /lost+found, but now, when I do an ls on lost+found, sometimes there are files there, and sometimes, there aren't.

Are there any disk utilities that come with RH 8.0 that I can use for running some hardware diagnostics on /dev/hda5?

thanks for any help.

Charlie

what kind of diognostics?
if you are searching for badblocks you can use badblocks
and to search your file system you can use fsck

man badblocks
man fsck

I manually ran badblocks from root on the / filesystem, physical drive /dev/hda3.

It came up with three bad blocks.

How do I get fsck to recognize these, move whatever is on these blocks somewhere else, and make sure the file system doesn't try and use these blocks any more?

I ran shutdown -rF, and it ran fsck on all the drives at boot time without any problem. I want to try and force fsck to do a full badblock check on all the partitions, and fix whatever's underneath, ideally at reboot time, when nothings mounted.

How would I do that?

Thanks in advance,

Charlie

I dug around in the docs, and found the following possible command, and was wondering if this would do the trick:

e2fsck -cypf /dev/hda3

I _think_ this should:

• c - run badblocks
• y - say yes to all questions
• p - preen/repair the filesystem
• f - force checking

Now, my only problem is how to unmount the root directory. It seems that when the system is running, there are several programs that have open files, which makes it impossible to unmount "/".

My questions are:

1. Is the above command correct to do what I want to do (identify badblocks, fix the file system, mark the blocks as unusable)?
2. How do I get the system in a state where I can safely execute that command?

TIA,

Charlie Peppler

I can't help you with the first question, but to answer your second question, you need to boot your computer in rescue mode. This explains how you do that:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...mode-boot.html