On Sun, 30 Aug 2020 at 04:08, Philip Rhoades <phil(a)pricom.com.au> wrote:
People,
I know this is not strictly a Fedora issue but I only use Fedora so I am
hoping people here can help - maybe we should have a separate mailing
list or forum topic for this sort of hard disk stuff?
Just after a full backup (fortunately) the 7.2TB /home partition
(/dev/sda5) on my email server somehow got corrupted.
Think about possible hardware issues including: overheating, bad cables,
failed disk.
smartmontools can tell you about problems with the drive and run the
drive's built-in tests.
Some vendors will issue a warranty return authorization on the strength of
linux smartctl
results.
After I realised
there was a problem, I unmounted the partition and tried:
e2fsck -y /dev/sda5
but the process hangs after “Clone multiply-claimed blocks<y>?” and the
disk goes quiet - I could still break out with CTRL-C but I can't get
past this point in the attempted fix process. So I thought I would just
produce a list of the affected files and then just delete the inodes or
just restore from backup but when I tried:
debugfs -R "ncheck 187536544" /dev/sda5
it took hours to find nothing but printed screenfulls of:
ncheck: "Directory block checksum" does not match directory block
while calling ext2_dir_iterate
and there are 1069 inodes to check!
I am guessing that if I just try to delete each of the inodes with:
debugfs -R "clri <inode>" /dev/sda5
that it would take weeks! So unless someone can suggest a faster method
of fixing the partition (mainly just as an exercise now) or at least
just working out what is wrong with it, I guess I will just have to
re-create the partition?
I wouldn't spend any time on this drive until I had confidence in the
hardware.
--
George N. White III