On Mon, 2002-12-02 at 17:10, John Vickers wrote: > Is there a simple way, at a shell script level, of finding out whether an ext3 fs > has a sane journal, other than mounting it or running a full fsck ? Define a "sane journal"? The journal just contains copies of disk blocks. It's nothing more than a list of "here's a copy of the new block number FOO of the filesystem." And the journal is *supposed* to contain gaps after an unexpected reboot --- it's by looking for missing bits that we work out just how much of the journal did get successfully written out to disk when things crashed. In other words, the journal is really really dumb, and there's next to no validation you can sensibly do on its contents without invoking a lot of filesystem layout knowledge (and at that point you're into full fsck territory.) > AFAICT, the usual way of handling ext3 filesystems seems to be to mark them with fs_passno=0, > so they never get fscked from the init scripts - but the journal gets replayed, and a few things > get checked at mount time. No, you should give them a valid pass number to force fsck to run, but when fsck sees an ext3 filesystem needing recovery, it skips the full check and just does the recovery stage. You still want the fsck to run because in case of a filesystem error being detected at run time, the kernel can mark the partition as having an error, and the subsequent fsck can pick that up and force a full fsck to fix it. That mechanism fails if you set the pass number to zero. You can disable forced fscks while preserving that error-recovery behaviour by leaving the passno intact but setting the fsck mount-count and check-intervals to zero with tune2fs. Cheers, Stephen _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
