Re: fsck question

[Seth Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu>]

* Bob Eldred <beldred1@home.com> [010123 21:22]:
> So, then, I managed to screw something up on my OpenBSD 2.8 machine, and the
> error given told me to run fsck.  However, the documentation on fsck (man
> fsck, man fstab, etc) is probably fine if you know what you are doing.  If
> you do not (and I probably would not have screwed up the machine if I did),
> it's somewhat Greek.

Well, the real good stuff is in fsck_ffs. You can run fsck with -n to
answer 'no' to all questions -- the filesystem is opened in read-only
mode, so it promises to not make the situation worse. :)

Basically, when it asks you to, you run fsck, and answer yes to
everything, and hope that it isn't too bad. If you end up answering
'yes' a lot, there is even a -y switch that will answer yes to all
questions it asks. (As my roommate once said, ``How on earth will I ever
know if I should answer NO?'' I haven't a clue either. :)

If worse comes to worse, you will do what you did -- reinstall the OS,
restore your data from backups, and go on. It happens. If all goes well,
the errors it finds won't be terrible, the files it can't figure out
what to do with will wind up in /lost+found, you identify the files
quickly, and nothing bad ever comes from it.

You pretty much just jump in, and hope it all works. :)

-- 
``Oh Lord; Ooh you are so big; So absolutely huge; Gosh we're all
really impressed down here, I can tell you.''