[KLUG Members] To mke2fs or not to mke2fs

[Bob Kanaley]

To mke2fs or not to mke2fs, that is the question.

Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not I should run mke2fs?

When I trashed my Raid 5 array, I made a last ditch effort to recover data
by

/sbin/mke2fs -S /dev/sdb1
followed by
/sbin/e2fsck /dev/sdb1

I accepted all the changes suggested by e2fsck, but found no data on the
array.

To get the system back up ASAP, I simply restored from my most recent
readable tape and the things seem to be working fine.

However, I am more than a little concerned about the integrity of my system
because I have not run a regular /sbin/mke2fs /dev/sdb1.

Now that I am confident that I am getting a good tape backup, this weekend I
would be able to down the server, run /sbin/mke2fs /dev/sdb1 and restore the
drive from tape.

Is this a good thing or am I just being paranoid about my file system?

Bob


Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk@agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com