fsck Process

by Jeff Hunter, Sr. Database Administrator

It's not uncommon under Solaris to get some fsck errors, especially if you powered off a
machine without doing a proper shutdown (or it crashed). The "FREE BLKS" errors is
extremely minor, you can safely just say "Y" to fixing those errors. This shouldn't happen
every time you boot, though, unless you aren't shutting down properly. It's also possible
to say "fsck -y" and then it will fix everything without prompting you.

Do not try to fsck a currently mounted filesystem - that will always produce an error
(and is a bad idea) because the filesystem data structures are "open" and there may be
changes in memory that have not been written to the disk yet. The proper way is to fsck
a filesystem when it's not mounted. How do you do that if it's the root filesystem you
want to fsck? Well, the OS does it at boot by mounting / readonly, fscking it, and then
remounting it read/write. My approach would be to boot off the CD ("boot cdrom -s, or
boot -s cdrom, from the ok prom prompt) and then fsck the hard disk.