Hi everyone,
In Windows, I can check a hard disk for errors with a couple of clicks of the mouse. How is this done in Linux? I have Fedora Core 2.
Thanks you so much,
Jazon
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
From a rescue boot you can do a non-destructive disk scan. That can reveal problems that an fsck won't find. And you can force an fsck to check for file system problems by 'touch /forcefsck' followed by a reboot.
From a rescue boot (with out the system mounted) one can do a non-destructive disk scan with 'badblocks -s -n /dev/hda' (replacing hda with the disk of interest).
Pirate, in order to do a proper check of the harddrive(s) in Windows you need to drop to single user (ie set it in motion and reboot) anyway. Windows gives you 1 way to do it while linux gives you several. Your "couple of mouse clicks" you mention wouldn't get you very far. I wanted to post this in defense of Linux as Pirate's follow up comment is fallacious. :)
For fsck/e2fsck, it is highly recommended that run it in the single user mode with minmium running processes.
As root, do
init -s
to go to single user mode.
Then run
fdisk -l
to see all the partition table
Once you get into single user mode, you may have to remount your partition read-only before fsck'ing it:
mount -o remount,ro /
Comment the external or not needed mount point during the system booting time.
and run fsck against the ext2/ext3 partitions to check the partition.
fsck /dev/hdaX
Hope this will work.
Thanks
Kazi Tariqul Islam
System Administrator
AXIATA (Bangladesh) Limited
You'll also want to check the health of the drive itself, with "smartctl".
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: Tim_UtschigPosted on 2006-01-02 at 16:08:11ID: 15594723
fsck /dev/hda1
Where /dev/hda1 is the partition to check for consistency errors.
You can further check for bad blocks (on an ext2/3 filesystem) with:
e2fsck -c /dev/hda1
Note this could take a LONG time depending on the size and speed of your disk.
Some file systems automatically handle bad blocks, so you don't have to go checking for them.