problems with fsck

[bousch@topo.matups.fr (Thierry Bousch)]

Chris Ridd writes:

> To digress slightly, I'm concerned that the fsck supplied with minixfs
> pl9 cannot fsck my first mfs partition after the AES has started (ie
> it is OK in the mint.cnf file, but otherwise it says "Cannot open
> drive D:").

This has nothing to do with the AES; fsck attempts to lock the drive
(using the Dlock() system call) to ensure that the data won't be modified
while it's running. This will fail if there are any open files on the
drive; you can check which process(es) have an open file on D: by
increasing the debug level.

You could also patch fsck so that he doesn't lock the drive, but it's
rather hazardous, especially if files are opened in read/write mode and
fsck isn't running with the -n option. This is just the same under Linux,
you can really hose your partitions if they're mounted read/write and
you run fsck on them.

Thierry.