Yup, fsck is a command line tool that does what scandisk does for dos. The only
thing is that you must be mounted in read-only mode to use it. The ext2
filesystem is not as prone to fragmentation as the fat filesystem, so you will
not need to use a defragmenter much, but there is one in Mandrake 6.1. It is
called defrag, fancy that. To use it, you must boot from a floppy disk, with a
rescue disk running. The bottom line is that Linux takes pretty good care of
the filesystem, and maintenance is low. Perriodically, when you boot your
system, you will get a message that the maximal mount count has been reached,
and that a check is being forced (I think about each 20 mounts). If fsck finds
any problems which require your intervention, the system will offer you the
chance to "dump to a prompt" to fix the trouble. Do so! Then you can run fsck
again, with the partition to be fixed as in:
fsck /dev/hdax (where x is the partition number)
This will run fsck in interactive mode, and will repair any problems, with your
permission.
The utility is quite complete, and I have had an occasion to profit from it.
I experienced a power failure recently, and the next time I started Linux, it
was time for a forced check. The check found a lot of duplicate inodes (or
nodes? - can't remember), and droped me to a prompt. I ran fsck (that is when I
looked in the man page using "man fsck" to learn how to use it), and got
everything working again. There was no data loss, or any other problems to my
knowlege. Linux continues to impress me more each day.
Ernie
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999,Richard Salts wrote:
| Like in Windows, are there any Linux maintenance programs where the user
| and/or root can use for system cleanups, optimization, etc.?
|
|
| Richard
