[TriLUG] screwed disk

[Alan Porter]

> Alan - what are you going to see if you partition / into the swap area -
> are you going to see junk directory entries? What if your partition is
> short?

You will not be able to mount the partition unless the starting point
is correct.  Otherwise, you'll see some error message from mount,
something like "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock
on /dev/hda1".

If your partition is short, you might be able to mount it, but may
run into problems if parts of your files are stored past the end of
the partition.  I am not sure.  But if your partition is larger
than your filesystem, you should be OK.

However, make sure that you do all of your experiments with a read-only
option (mount -o ro).  Otherwise, it may write some accounting info
(like access times, etc) to some part of the partition that it thinks
it owns.  If your partition end is not exactly where it used to be,
you might be inadvertently writing that accounting info into the next
partition.  Of course, if the only other partition is swap, then you're
not really doing any damage.  I think that illustrates the point, though.


Alan






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