Stupid mistake with fsck

[Xamien]

Hey guys,

I'll go ahead and start this off by admitting that I did something really stupid. In my defense, I'd been awake since 4:40 that morning, but still...

I ran into that errno:30 after I left it to re-emerge system files (it needed maintenance and cleaning up), looked it up and saw a remark about fsck and ran it right on the logged-in system. (Yes, without logging in on a livecd or ANYTHING. Yes, moronic.) I don't know fully, yet, if this has resulted in a corrupted filesystem since I had to go to work right after finding out the horror.

So... take pity upon a penitent geek and give some advice about perhaps recovering from this? Also, any advice about running diagnostics on the drive itself would be much appreciated. It's a Maxtor 120GB drive.

Thanks in advance,
X

[Xamien]

le bump

[Hu]

If the system is still powered up, remount all affected partitions read-only. Once remounted, copy any important files off the system.

If the system is not up, do not boot it from the hard drive until you are sure your data is in a good state.

In either case: what filesystem are you using? What is the output of sfdisk -l your-hard-drive? Which partitions did you fsck?

[Xamien]

Thanks for replying. I actually started searching forums about recovering the lost+found file but it appears that trying that with as many files got sent to it was going to take too long even for someone as patient as I tend to be. The main drive (which was hda3) had the grace to put itself into read-only mode automatically. I checked the rest of the drive and was able to actually recover the -really- important files from my home directory and tar them up to the backup 10GB I have. Most fortunate considering it was those files I was most stressed out about. It's a pain that I had to drop the etwolf pk3s I had accumulated but that's not a big deal, really. Even managed to save my .wine folder, too!

So for now, I've basically cleared out hda3 and plan to do a complete reinstall. Only problem is that I need to actually check hda to make sure there isn't a drive failure of any sort (never had any prior to this but that doesn't necessarily mean anything). I am curious to know if it'll be safe to rebuild the system using distcc. Can I expect a sane system or should I not risk it?

[Hu]

I recommend against using any tools which were installed on hda to assist in the rebuilding. I doubt that any of them would produce subtly corrupt output, but it is possible that some of them depend on files which were destroyed by the fsck. That dependency would make the build fail, requiring your intervention to get it working again. Since you intend to reinstall, it would be simpler just to treat all packages on hda as suspect.

I know of no problems using distcc to build a system, so once you have one rebuilt, it should be safe to begin distributing the load.

[blueflame]

What I don't understand is why fsck actually let you run it on a mounted filesystem. Shouldn't it give you an error message or at least a warning?