A friend told me that the e2fsck program could be set to scan your hard disk partitions on the next boot. He said it sets a flag to force a scan on the next boot of the system - before the partitions are mounted by the system.

http://man.linuxmanpages.com/man8/e2fsck.8.php

I just looked over the man page for e2fsck and don't see any references to forcing a scan on the next reboot.

Is my friend wrong?

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

No, he's right. You can even get shutdown to trigger it using the "-F" flag if memory serves.

Now if I could just remember how to delay it so when I'm doing testing it doesn't trigger every 32 boots (that goes by really fast sometimes).

BTW - Thanks for reminding me to look this up, tune2fs is the utility that lets you fiddle these params.

Do you see any of the e2fsck switches that look like they would force the scan on next boot? None look obvious to me.

Appreciated,
Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

From the shutdown man page:



Alternatively, you can Login as the root, change directory to root (/) directory and manually create that empty file named forcefsck (source for that little trick).:

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Any idea if will force a scan of all partitions - specifically the /myth partition (/dev/sda3)?

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

I believe it will run through all the partitions in your /etc/fstab assuming you haven't set them to 0 in the 6th column (pass or fsck options).

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

This is a scan of sda3 - the /myth partition.
Does 13% fragmentation seem like a lot?

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

In my mind, yeah it does seem like too much. Others may disagree.

What is the file system of /dev/sda3? Ext3 or...? Unless it's XFS, I don't think you can use a defragger on it (ext2/ext3 for example). Have a look at this howto for more on XFS and XFS defragging. There is also a section in the howto with info that should help you avoid future fragmentation, but as file systems age, they also become fragmented (so long as they are being used as they age). If you have less than 20 % free space, this too can contribute to fragmentation.

You can defrag an ext3 partition if you literally copy all the files off it, reformat it, and copy them back. If you're gonna go through the trouble of doing that, you might as well use a filesystem designed for large files (XFS) and one that has an online defragger

Your other option is to just leave it and wait for R6 to go final. The 2.6.29 and above kernel support ext4 which is rumored to have an online defragger although as of right now as I write this reply, no such util is stable to my knowledge.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

The /myth partition is ext3. The 1TB drive is about 70% full.

I record and delete about 2GB a day.

I started wondering about fragmentation, when I saw a standard definition recording being made a week or 2 ago, and the hard drive access LED was blinking more rapidly than it used to do during a standard definition recording, from the PVR-150 card. With standard definition recordings, the hard drive light used to blink maybe 1 time per second. Now it is more like 5 times per second. This has become a trend, so I suspected fragmentation.

Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

Probably best to switch to XFS in your situation...

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Does anyone know of an easy way to skip fsck on a the current boot?
I can hit control-c but then it doesn't mount the partition and I still can't use the system. Apparently on Ubuntu you can hit escape to delay it until the next boot, does this work on Knoppmyth? (I read this after it had already done the scan.)
If there isn't something as simple as a keypress I will add an option to the Knoppmyth menu to "Reboot without fsck." so that I can at least shorten the process a bit.

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Paul Turpie
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Google says we used to do this in Ubuntu before they added it to the distro:

See man e2fsck.conf(5). Create a file /etc/e2fsck.conf, with the
contents:

[options]
allow_cancellation = true

Then you should be able to type ^C while it is doing a check, and
cancel the fsck. (It is safe to abort fsck while it is scanning the
filesystem.)

To force a scan on a particular partition use:


This assumes that you have a scan set up for every say 30 mounts. It sets the current mount count to 9999. If you have tweaked your ext file system to use time based fsck you would need to run

and look for the time based fsck options.

Thanks Cliffsjunk,
I give that a go this weekend.

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Paul Turpie
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