I have a colo across the country, so going to the datacenter is out of the question. I think it has some disc errors and the colo place wants $50 an hour to check. So, can I check the disc remotely or will they have to do it?

I know that (most?) file systems need to be unmounted before you can run fsck on it. I suppose if you have two hard drives then you can just unmount the second hard drive and check it. However, I doubt you can unmount your boot drive to run fsck on it.

Peter

Check dmesg to see if you have any reported disk errors. Regardless of the outcome you can force a fsck on reboot.

shutdown -rF now

Be sure to have a backup before executing the above. If you have severe disk errors running a forced fsck may kill your drive.

just mount the file system read-only then do the fsck then reset it read write

mount -o remount,ro /dev/whatever ; fsck -y /dev/whatever ; mount -o remount,rw /dev/whatever

Steve

Would that be safe though? (mounting the file system read-only). What about open files, log files, etc...?

Peter

OK, I did the shutdown -rF now thing that was recomended. Now where do I see the output of this?

(I think, I am not sure) you wait until you server comes back up (assuming the fsck was fine), run "dmesg" to see the boot up message, which should include the result of the check.

Peter

The server came back up, but dmesg doesn't have anything in it about the fsck operation.

How quickly did it come up? (if it was just a snap, the checking might not have been performed).

Peter

I would say 5 minutes, give or take..........it's a 40 gig drive.

Why do you need to fsck the drives?

Anyway, put it in an rc script so it gets run on bootup.