In my opinion the badblocks scan of fsck exists only for historic reasons. The disk itself can probably do far better itself:
smartctl -t long /dev/sda to initiate a long self test. This even works while the disk is in active use! smartctl -a for all disk status and then some. I'd venture to say any Linux user who doesn't have smartmontools installed and configured doesn't deserve any better... Configure regular disk self tests, and get any problems emailed. That way you get an email when a bad sector occurs. Warning: Some semi-recent versions of smartmontools (incl 6.0) had a bug where the self-tests were not run with DISKSCAN, but only for explicitly listed disks. If I wanted to do a read-check without smartmontools I'd use dd, that also works with the disk in active use. I don't think fsck -c has any benefit over a long self test, but it does waste time (and don't run it on SSDs). In response to the original question about advice for fsck on a huge FAT filesystem: by far the best action is mkfs -text4... fatfs is braindead, and tends to have fs errors all the time too. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.top.geek.nz/ Please do not CC list postings to me. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
