fsck fails on /dev/root under SCO (was Re: fsck Recovery From Crashes)

[Peter Funk]

In <1991Jun02.184143.15566 at virtech.uucp> 
	cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
[....on problems with fsck...]
cpc> >Opinions accepted, but please document them as such!

cpc> All this stuff is opinions.

Taking up this thread I try to tell you something about our experiences 
with several Systems running SCO XENIX 386 rel. 2.3.2.
Every once a while a customer presses the RESET, or turns power off, or...
Sigh ... you surely known this kind of PeeCee-Users.

We 've experienced the following Problem, when running fsck on the 
root-filesystem (which is automatically invoked during the next boot):

The superblock or the free list header (I not familar enough with the 
internals) is NOT correctly rewritten from fsck, leaving the whole file 
system somehow corrupt under certain circumstances.  

In some rather rare situations the file system will end up in a state, 
where following attempts with 'fsck' will exit during phase 1 without 
any further error message (only the nonzero exit code indicates an error).

Since I've discovered this problem, we instruct our customers to use
a specially prepared "emergency boot"-floppydisk, which automatically runs
'fsck' from floppy on /dev/hd0root.  This workaround solves the problem,
but the manual handling is ... uh.... cumbersome ? In german I would 
call it "nervig" ;-)

Regards, Peter
P.S.: Excuse my awful english grammar and spelling
-=-=-
Peter Funk \\ ArtCom GmbH, Schwachhauser Heerstr. 78, D-2800 Bremen 1
Work at home: Oldenburger Str.86, D-2875 Ganderkesee 1/phone : no chance ;-)