Then again, how big is the filesystem? .. Nevermind... I looked back at your original post.
A couple of ideas:
1) make a backup AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE before shutting down the system... If possible, after all services have been shut down.
(if you can't do that, then backup everything, then backup everything that's changed since the first backup started, then shut down services and
backup everything since the incremental backup started. (for minimal down time).
If you've backed up to a second system that can replace the running (and broken system), then use the second system in place of the corrupt system, and you're now relatively happy. You can work on cleaning up the filesystem and/or figuring out what broke it.
otherwise, you can either (1) wipe the filesystem and restore it from backup, or (2) FSCK the system in hopes of cleaning things up ((( or, ultimately, both, if #2 fails))).
A couple of more options:
1: install / build smartmontools for your system and make sure that the drive, itself, isn't failing.
2: the problem is with your root filesystem, and I'm presuming that /home is where most of your 'live' data is. This means that, if you follow the process above, your final incremental backup should be TINY.
If the hard drive, itself, isn't failing, then you can build yourself a new root filesystem (on an external usb/esata drive, if you don't
have hot-swap capability) from/as your backup , and boot off of that. That would mean a minimal investment in new hardware (if you have a limited budget
and/or esoteric hardware on your system). and minimal downtime (a few minutes) .
If you have a second machine with the same/similar mother board, then you can practice booting off of the spare drive there.
Worst case would be to boot off of a live CD and do an FSCK that way, but it could take quite a while, and there is no guarantee that the filesystem will have all of the parts left to be bootable after that, if FSCK removes a bunch of critical files -- or the files are already corrupted.
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Uematsu Takeshi <takeshi.uematsu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Stephen,
Thank you for your adviece.
I have not done an FSCK yet.
/dev/sda2 is /(root) partition.
I know that it shouldn't execute fsck with the mounted filesystem.
and cannot umount root file system.
This system cannot be stopped.
Do you know how to check the filesystem without stop ?
2011/2/4 Stephen Samuel <samuel@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 1) do a backup (NOW!) if you haven't already done TWO.
> 2) Have you done an FSCK with the filesystem unmounted?
> (given that you pretty clearly have some corruption, you might want to
> do an 'fsck -n', and just see what FSCK is proposing to do to the system.
>
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Uematsu Takeshi <takeshi.uematsu@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,This is Takeshi Uematsu.
>>
>> I have a trouble on the ext3 filesystem.
>> The df command indicates minus disk usage.
>> Dose anyone know why this happned ?
>> Any ideas be appreciated.
>>
>> # df -h
>> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/sda2 97G -26G 118G - /
>> /dev/sda1 99M 15M 80M 16% /boot
>> tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm
>> /dev/sda3 803G 3.9G 758G 1% /home
>>
>> fdisk /dev/sda
>>
>> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
>> /dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
>> /dev/sda2 14 13067 104856255 83 Linux
>> /dev/sda3 13068 121193 868522095 83 Linux
>> /dev/sda4 121194 121454 2096482+ 82 Linux swap /
>> Solaris
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
> --
> Stephen Samuel http://www.bcgreen.com Software, like love,
> 778-861-7641 grows when you give it away
>
--
Stephen Samuel http://www.bcgreen.com Software, like love,
778-861-7641 grows when you give it away
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