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How to Check Disk for Errors in Linux

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

Tim_Utschig

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.

wesly_chen

piratepatrol

ASKER

Heheh! When I typed fsck /dev/hda2, I got this

WARNING!!! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage.

So I aborted.

Before I did this, I tried init -s, but it said invalid option -- s.

hda 2 is the main partition where all my apps are.

SOLUTION

Tim_Utschig

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SOLUTION

wesly_chen

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

jlevie

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piratepatrol

ASKER

Thanks, you guys. Wow, I was hoping it would be just a couple of mouse clicks like in Windows! :-)

srahrens

There's a much easier way to do this:
touch /forcefsck

chrislarsen123

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. :)

tariqul

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

brycen

You'll also want to check the health of the drive itself, with "smartctl".

smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-suse-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 family
Device Model: ST3120814A
Serial Number: 3LS0ABF9
Firmware Version: 2AAA
User Capacity: 120,034,123,776 bytes
ATA Version is: 7
Local Time is: Fri Oct 16 12:32:49 2009 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 055 038 006 Pre-fail Always - 42658921
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged