Re: fsck required?

Friday, 22 April 2022

On Fri, 22 Apr 2022 at 07:05, <andreas.fournier(a)runbox.com&gt; wrote:

...
 On Thu, 2022-04-21 at 21:09 -0400, Jonathan Billings wrote:
 > On Apr 21, 2022, at 11:24, andreas.fournier(a)runbox.com wrote:
 > >
 > > Anyway so I have a laptop that only boots to emergency shell. There
 > > journalctl says that fsck failed with exit status 4 for
 > > /dev/mapper/fedora-root
 > > If I run fsck I only get back 'fsck from util-linux 2.37.4'
 > >
 > > Any advice how to rescue this laptop would be appreciated.
 >
 > The ‘fsck’ needs a parameter.  Either give the drive
 > (/dev/mapper/fedora-root) or just run ‘fsck -a’.

 Thanks. I ran it and it said it corrected all the errors. There were a
 lot. After it I've been following journalctl -fl and haven't seen
 anything special there. What I'm wondering about is what I should think
 of my harddisk? Was this incident perhaps some software error or the
 first indication that the harddisk is about to fail completely?

We don't know the history.  If the system lost power or crashed the disk
could be fine.  Smartmon tools can tell you if a disk is sick, but there are
"sudden" failures that the tools can't predict.  Modern disk manufacturing
is very reproducible.  Under heavy use, the failure rate goes up at end-of-
warranty.  I routinely replace system disks when the warranty expires.
Disks that are run near capacity tend to fail earlier than ones that have
maintained ample free space.

Google your drive model -- some drives have a history of early failures.
There may be firmware updates or in some cases free replacements.

-- 
George N. White III