Tonight, I corrupted my file system by inadvertently jerking the plug that supplies electricity.
I run Slackware 9.0 (very old) and it automatically runs fsck on boot up. At the time, I was told my file system was corrupt and I was invited to log in as root to fix it.
Fortunately, it suggested that I run the following command:
e2fsck -v -y
It suggested that the above command might fix my file system if I was running the ext2 file system.
I was not sure which filesystem I was running on this old laptop, which is about 10 years old. It works so flawlessly that I pay little attention to its internals.
I remembered the root password and logged in as root, just as it suggested. I then executed the following commands:
cd /etc more fstab
I saw the following line in the file called fstab, the place where the file system table is kept:
/dev/hda2 / ext2 defaults 1 1
If I copied the above in my notes correctly, this one line entry is what you see above. Looks like I do have an ext2 file system and the file system starts at /dev/hda2.
Now that I knew what kind of file system I had and where it started, I ran the following command:
e2fsck -v -y /dev/hda2
I'm not sure what the -v option is. However, it appears that the -y option means yes. The e2fsck program ran and each time it prompted me for a yes or a no, it answered yes all by itself and kept scrolling.
The fsck program took a few minutes to run and it seems to have fixed the file system flawlessly. Love those Unix utilities!
I'll know what to do next time..
Ed Abbott
