Re: [cobalt-users] (raq4) disk maintenance

[flash22@xxxxxxx]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Dan Keller wrote:

> At 12:54 PM 10/2/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >> Is there some equivalent to defrag and scandisk on a Raq4?
> 
> The most useful disk storage maintenance tool
> in my experience on Unix-type platforms is fsck.
> If your disk has bad blocks, it will find them (and
> other things, too.)  Defragging is not an issue
> with this filesystem;  fragmented files do not
> degrade performance.  But if you reeeally believe
> this to be a problem (e.g. you have some disk-
> intensive, i/o-bound application) you can collect
> your files in a tar archive (see "man tar" for details),
> then delete them, then restore them from the archive.

I'd add this:

**WARNING** fsck should NOT be run on a filesystem while you are using it!

I have seen a few dos-to-unix folks not realize this :)

Fragmentation is rarely an issue unless you have been consistantly filling
up the filesystem, in which case the kernel has little choice as to where
to put data, it has to put it in whetever space is left, at that point
even ext2 filesystems can get somewhat scattered...

Foo on all the folks who said there is no such program btw, it's here

http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html

It's part of the tools ;)

It's also can only be run onunmounted filesystems, which is an interesting
challenge on a Raq if you have no console -/

Also, older versions of fsck don't actually run badblocks, theere is a
seperate program named, oddly enough, badblocks, which will do a simple
media scan reading all the blocks to check for i/o errors....

Also, fsck doesn't by default, scan for bad blocks (eg on boot, it would 
take hours to boot if it did ;)

gsh