I'm not seeing how doing an fsck from a live cd helps.
On 11/17/19 11:50, Mick wrote:
On Sunday, 17 November 2019 10:30:49 GMT Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Sun, 17 Nov 2019 11:21:18 +0100, n952162 wrote:
(in fact, that's exactly the situation that I've been confronted with
and have turned to this mailing list to help me with: X locked up, my
power-button was unresponsive so I had to force it down (holding the
power key down for 30 seconds), and on reboot TWO filesystems had to be
rebuilt by fsck, with substantial loss of organization and of data
(despite both being ext3/4 journaling filesystems - I just don't
understand that!) )
As has been mentioned before holding the power button down until the system
powers off is equal to a hard shutdown. No write caches are flushed, no data
is synced to disk and any writes could be left in mid air resulting in a
messed up fs. I always boot with a LiveUSB/CD and perform a fsck without
mounting any drives, before I will try to boot the system normally again.
If you lose power while the system is idle and no write operations are in
process/waiting, then you may well have no loss of data as a result.
Please don't top-post on this list.
Magic SysReq would probably have helped in those situations. ext3/4 only
journal metadata by default, you can specify a mount option to also
journal data but it impacts performance.
When X hangs and I lose the keyboard to the extent where neither Ctrl+Alt+F1,
or Ctrl+Alt+Del would work, I will use ssh to connect remotely and stop the
hanging process or restat the X server. If ssh is also not working, I use the
magic SysReq sequence to stop processes, sync the disks and reboot, or
shutdown. I don't recall losing data in such cases, although when I have time
I run fsck with Live media just in case.
