Why does ext3 still need to be checked?

[Xamindar]

I remember when rieserfs came out that there was big talk about not having to do filesystem checks because it was a journaled filesystem. But I use ext3 which should also be a journaling filesystem as far as I know. But it still checks every 25 startups or whatever and it fsck does find errors occasionally.

Why is that? Isn't that the point of a journaled filesystem? So you don't have to spend 10 minuted watching it check every once and a while?

[adsmith]

It doesn't have to, of course. Do tune2fs -c 0 /dev/whatever to turn off periodic checking.

However, it is still a good idea to do a fsck every once in a while, since things can go wrong in hardware that you might never know about.


Of course, the periodic fsck always happens at 11pm when you *really* need to get the server up now!

[i92guboj]

[bobobo]

The point of the journal is that the fs knows what happened (recently), as a result it doesn't need to check everything in case of a problem, making checks much faster. Normally, it should only do a check when the fs wans't correctly unmounted, and it should be fast. The check that you are getting every 25 mount is most likely a parameter which can be changed with tune2fs, check "man tune2fs". For example "tune2fs -i 300d /dev/<hd here>" will set the check to a 300 days interval. I've set mine on 300 days just in case, but it has never been really needed.

edit: oh, and "tune2fs -c 0 /dev/whatever" like said on an earlier post. -c is for mount-dependant checking, -i is for time dependant checking.

[Xamindar]

Thanks for the information guys. That clarifies it a lot.

[Roman_Gruber]

i have luck, i had errors on these checks. So i replaced my western disk with a new samsung disk and everthing was gone. The old disk was 1 year old.