[Cyberguy2]

Are there any utilities for maintaining the hard drive in linux ( such as scandisk and disk defragment in windows).

Recently while booting it said that (linux) it was checking the file system. But after showing fixed for a few times it showed failed. It asked me a question Control-D for maintenance or enter root password or something like that i entered the root password but i was not able to do anything . I then reset my computer and when it said that the file system was not cleanly unmounted press "y" within 4 seconds I pressed escape and my computer booted normally to linux.
Please Help Me Out

[DaijoubuKun]

no need for defrag, if your running a files system like ext3 it'll take care of fragmentation while idle. for something like scandisk, use tune2fs (or fsck, do a 'man' on both). Altho, you must run it while the filesystem (ie /dev/hda2) is unmounted. So you may need to boot off and install disk or you can probabilly use knoppix.

[Cyberguy2]

Thanks
But will ext2 do the same, i have installed redhatlinux 9 on ext2 will it defragment automatically.
But how can i give commands from the installer disk.
What does the lines i have made bold in my first post mean.

[DaijoubuKun]

the lines you have in bold (if I remember correctly) is that something has happened to your HD, usually bad sectors. ext2 will defragment for you, the only different between ext2 and ext3 (there are several small things) is that ext3 is a journalized file system. I highly recommend that.

From an install disk you can run 'fsck.ext2 -cfpv /dev/(partition. ex. hda1, hda2)'
this is designed for ext2 filesystems. If it tells you that the device is mounted, exit! do not scan while drive is mounted. use the 'umount' command to unmount the device. and try scanning again.

I just hope that some installer disk will have fsck. Some distro's have it, some don't.

Next time it boots up copy exactly what the error is. That way I may be able to tell you what to do. I've had that happen to me before, and I had to use my installer disk to modify many files on the HD and scan for bad sectors.

[tsunam]

after ~37 mounts (starts) a lot of filesystems will run a check on themselves automatically, to check for corruptions etc. Generally it won't find anything but occassionally it does. Just think of it as a added safety line.

[Cyberguy2]

Thank you i never knew about it and i think i will migrate to ext3 as advised by DaijoubuKun .
Thank you all for the help