Question

I have a problem with UBUNTU 10.04 filesystem, which reports different results when a drive is mounted and checked with FSCK as the system drive and when it is checked by another system drive:

sudo fsck /dev/sdb1
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
e2fsck 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

   57217 inodes used (24.81%)
      42 non-contiguous files (0.1%)
      65 non-contiguous directories (0.1%)
         # of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 0/0/0
         Extent depth histogram: 50910/20
  293868 blocks used (31.88%)
       0 bad blocks
       1 large file

   43327 regular files
    7242 directories
      59 character device files
      26 block device files
       0 fifos
     509 links
    6549 symbolic links (6187 fast symbolic links)
       5 sockets
--------
   57717 files

sudo fsck -n -t ext4 /dev/sda1     
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
e2fsck 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
Warning!  /dev/sda1 is mounted.
Warning: skipping journal recovery because doing a read-only filesystem check.
/dev/sda1 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Free blocks count wrong (628134, counted=628213).
Fix? no

Free inodes count wrong (173391, counted=173379).
Fix? no


/dev/sda1: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors **********

/dev/sda1: 57217/230608 files (0.1% non-contiguous), 293722/921856 blocks

Whenever the drive is mounted as the system / boot drive, running fsck (check don’t fix) shows INODE and BLOCK counts are wrong, yet checking the same drive from another system disk reports that it’s fine.

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

This should probably be on SuperUser or ServerFault, not StackOverflow, but anyway:

you can only fsck -n a file system that is mounted read-only. While the file system is mounted read-write, it will be inconsistent until cleanly unmounted, or the journal is recovered. The important message is

Warning: skipping journal recovery because doing a read-only filesystem check.