[ILUG] e2fsck

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Brendan Halpin (brendan.halpin at ul.ie):

> I've got a bunch of bad blocks showing up lately, and I want to fix
> them (temporarily, I reckon, as the disc is probably dying).
> 
> Can I do "e2fsck -c /dev/hda" on a running machine? 

Um... hda is the physical disk as a whole.  You probably mean one of
hda1, hda2, etc.

Running e2fsck -c on a mounted filesystem carries with it a significant
probability of the system freaking out and hanging.  Much better would
be to have the filesystem _unmounted_, and run the badblocks utility on
it.

> Particularly, what's /initrd? It doesn't seem to be on my other
> system.

Obviously something related to an initial RAMdisk, used by the booting
kernel to load driver modules required to recognise the rest of the
hardware.  E.g., your drivers for your hard disk's host adapter might be
loaded from such a RAMdisk.

As to what specifically is in your directory of that name, you be the
judge:  Look in there, and determine that for yourself.  It could be
an initrd image file referenced in your bootloader (e.g., in
/etc/lilo.conf) -- or it could be a set of drivers that a separate
script can use to _constrct_ an initrd image file.

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