#33 Specifically state if disk was repaired

[Anonymous]

This is a terrrific tool. I have one question however. when the disk
repair is run the mesage says the disk was either repaired or is OK.
My understanding is that it is a good idea to run "fsck" again (and if
necessary again etc.) if the disk was repaired. In this way repairs
that could not be done at the first pass are done in the next pass. In
other word keep running "fsck" until it comes up "Appears to be
OK".

In Applejack the ambiguous wording as to the status of the repair
means that the user never really knows if a repair was done.

Would it be possible to indicate if the disk was actually repaired? Or
is my knowledge so shallow that it really is not necessary. I am far
from an expert in either operating systems or disk repair.

James Latta
jameslatta@mac.com

[Kristofer Widholm]

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What makes this difficult is that the fsck utility returns
either a 0 or a 1 when it has finished running. 0 means it
ran successfully, but that can either mean that there were
no problems, or it can mean that if there were problems,
they were fixed. A zero is a zero, so I can't really
determine within the programme whether the disk was
repaired. What you can do, though, is look at the output
from the fsck "disk repair" routine. If you see it fixing
things, and still reporting "Success!" at the end, then you
know your disk was repaired. If all you get are a bunch of
lines saying "checking..." but no lines providing any errors
found on the disk, then your disk was probably fine to begin
with.

[Marcel_75]

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@first: thx a lot for this great tool!

But the problem James Latta was talking about is IMHO a really big
problem.
It's right what James was thinking/talking: the problem with fsck is, that it
can only repair one problem per run. So if fsck found problems and
repaired them, you need to run fsck again and again as "The Macintosh
HD appears to be OK" is displaying!
If not (and this time AppleJack don't do it "right" I think) you maybe have
file system problems you should repair as fast as possible.
I know the problem kwidholm was talking about later, but I hope Kristofer
will find a good solution?
So far I will run fsck -f manually in SingleUserMode and if anything was
repaired successfully, I start AppleJack.
Maybe it's a good idea to talk about this phenomenom in the readme of
AppleJack?

Cheers,
Marcel Dietzmann

[Kristofer Widholm]

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It looks like I'll have to say this again :-)

There is no way for me to be able to guess whether the 0
when fsck has finished is because there were no errors, or
if the 0 means that there were errors, but they were fixed.
I can't see your machine running, I can only write the
script on the basis of what fsck gives back to me.

I'll make it really simple: I CAN'T do anything about this.

If you use AppleJack in auto mode, and are bothered by this,
then I recommend using AppleJack in manual mode and just
re-running the disk repair as often as you like.

Maybe there's some brilliant programmer out there who could
figure out a way to do this, but to me, a 0 is a 0, and
unless you want AppleJack to run forever and ever re-doing
disk repair, it has to stop once it gets a 0 exit code from
fsck. Sorry.

[Kristofer Widholm]

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I should add if there are any really brilliant
bash-scripters out there familiar with fsck and if they can
figure out a way to do this, I'd be more than happy to
implement this feature request. I'll leave the request open
in the hopes someone might contribute.

[Kristofer Widholm]

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Another addendum...

In my own experience (which is of course a terrible guide to
go by, but I'll share it anyway), I have never had fsck exit
with a 0 and then have it encounter problems when run again.
My understanding has been that a 0 on exit meant that all
problems encountered had been repaired successfully.

Next time you have disk errors, try this out in AppleJack.
See if it reports "Success! Either no problems or all
problems were fixed", and then run the disk repair routine
again. If you see that fsck finds more problems after having
received the success message, let me know, so I can get rid
of my hypothesis.