tayllorkh

When I tried to do a disk check using the Disk Utility - it said 'An
error has occurred while performing an operation on "318 GB file
system (Partition 1 of ATA WDC WD 3200AAJ5-224A0: the drive is
busy.)'

I got this message when I tried it immediately after a restart and
nothing else was running (so how could the drive be busy)? Why
couldn't I do a disk check with the Disk Utility? Is there another
way to do it? (I like to check for disk problems once a week - is
this advisable for Ubuntu?
Thank you for your help.

The partition needs to be unmounted before you can check it.
It has probably been auto-mounted when you rebooted.
So unmount it, then check it.

How would I 'unmount the partition'?
Thank you for your help.

You do have man pages .
Man umount gives you the syntax of the umount command
To unmount a partition you have to it as root so sudo umount /dev/??? partition name

Could you please give me the exact command in the terminal?? I am new to Ubuntu.
Thank you,

Hi cygpen,

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+would+I+%27...rtition%27%3F+

Seriously, running fsck (which is what is executed by the Disk Utility) can be dangerous stuff. If you do it on a partition which is mounted your data can become toast. And, you cannot unmount partitions which Linux is using so...

Linux keeps track of how many times a partition has been mounted since the last fsck. Each time you boot the PC it compares this number against a threshold which was set when the partition was created and formatted (during installation in your case). You may see messages at bootup such as "...partition has been mounted xx times...check will be forced in 3 mounts" or something like that. And the third time later when you boot it will say something like "...check in process press C to cancel..." So you do not need to do the checks yourself unless you are having problems with your drive.

In that case the best policy is to boot the PC from the Ubuntu Live (installation) CD and then issue the fsck commands. With Linux running from the CD it has not mounted the partitions on the hard drive and they are safe to check.

Ken

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Taylorkh

Once again - thank you! When you reply - I always understand. Many thanks for gearing your replies to my level.

Glad to help.

There is a lot to learn about Linux. The best way is probably by doing. That said, here is a link to some excellent training material from Canonical - the vendor behind Ubuntu. It is based on version 8.04 so it is somewhat out of date. Some programs have changed (e.g. Libre Office replaced OpenOffice.org as the productivity suite) or disappeared (a utility to stop, start and configure services). However, a lot of the material is still relevant. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training/PDF...en-student.pdf It might be worth downloading a copy and browsing through it.

The official Ubuntu documentation https://help.ubuntu.com/ also has a lot of good information. And Ubutu has its own forum http://ubuntuforums.org/

Of course there is linuxquesions.org which I have found to be the most responsive group.

Ken

Thank you for the training sites. I will peruse them - before asking any more inane questions.