Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 29 Jun 1999 13:16:48 -0400 | Subject | Re: Corrupted partitions | From | tytso@mit ... |
| |
From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com> Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 18:36:28 +0100 (BST)
> Hang on! In an earlier email, you said that the reason that mke2fs > preallocates 12 blocks to lost+found is because e2fsck has problems > allocating blocks when fixing a corrupted file system, but now you > state that no such problem exists !!! Which is it?
e2fsck has no problem in principle, but the disk may be full and there's not much it can do in that case. Preallocating lost+found just eliminates one extra possible error situation.
The other reason why you want to avoid allocating blocks via e2fsck happens when part of the inode table has gotten munched, so that e2fsck doesn't have an accurate listing of all the blocks which might be in use. In such a case, an expert might very well want to link all disconnected inodes into lost+found without allocating any blocks, and then only later decide whether or not he/she needs to use a direct disk block editor to try to recover really precious data that can't be saved any other way.
But e2fsck can allocate blocks for lost+found (or the root directory for that matter if it has been trashed). It's just that you want to avoid doing if possible.
Of course, the right answer to all of this is to religiously back up all of your data so you don't have to go to such extreme measures, but we know how often people do backups, right? :-)
- Ted
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |