Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 133965
`fsck -y` automatically answers "y" to the question "duplicate/clone bad blocks"
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:50 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3 Description of problem: `fsck -y` automatically answers "y" to the question "duplicate/clone bad blocks". 1) The man page says nothing about "y" applying to this situation. It only says that "y" answers yes to all questions about whether or not to fix a problem. If the disk is really hosed have "y" apply to this option takes a lot of additional time. 2) The man page also says nothing about what the question/option of cloning bad blocks (e.g. why would a user want to? how could they do with these bad blocks, etc?) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): e2fsprogs-1.35-11.i386.rpm How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Load rawhide-9-27-04 and disonnect power abruptly 2. Manually run `fsck -y` 3. Additional info: Created in while encountering bugzilla #133959
Excerpt from the manpage of fsck: -y For some filesystem-specific checkers, the -y option will cause the fs-specific fsck to always attempt to fix any detected filesystem corruption automatically. This includes ALL filesystem corruptions and also bad blocks. Closing as "NOT A BUG".
If I have selected the wrong component, please let me know. I read the man page before posting the bug. The man page needs to be updated. 1) The man page does not discuss "duplicating or cloning" bad blocks. 2) What is the benefit of "duplicating or cloning" a bad block...? How can a user access the bad blocks and what would they do with them? 3) Why would "duplicating or cloning a bad block" be considered "fixing" a problem on the disk? It appears that *copies* of the bad blocks are being made as opposed to *fixing* them.
1) A bad block is a hardware problem or failure and is not readable in parts or complete. This is a problem for the filesystem, which might have data in this block. 2) The solution for this is to mark this block as bad and to copy all available data to another block to reduce data loss. 3) The copy of the bad block might have usable data in it and the filesystem is not using the bad block anymore so this is some kind of fixing the filesystem.