Score:3

Accidentally ran fsck against mounted esp partition

cn flag

I accidentally ran fsck against my esp(EFI boot) partition while it was mounted. Fsck reported that the filesystem's boot sector backup differed from it's current state at offset 65. This means that the dirty bit was set in the current state but not in the backup so I chose no action. Next it informed me that the dirty bit was set so I chose to remove it, no other errors were reported so I wrote the changes.

Could this have damaged my esp? My PC boots fine, and rerunning fsck with the partition unmounted reports no errors.

Score:5
ng flag

fsck is a "file system check". It will scan for file system errors and attempt to fix them. It is unlikely to damage anything that was not already damaged, like file system errors caused by a failing hard drive.

Since you are reporting no problems, it's safe to assume that everything is fine.

Jojo01 avatar
cn flag
Thanks, I've read that running fsck against a mounted partition can damage it so I just wanted to be sure. Could it not have damaged anything because the esp partition is FAT and not Ext4?
Nmath avatar
ng flag
fsck is a frontend for several file system specific file system checking tools, fsck.fat being one of those. It's not recommended to use it on a mounted file system because problems can arise when repairs are being made, but in your case, if everything works fine, I wouldn't worry about it
chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- avatar
Note that it absolutely _can_ cause problems with a stateful filesystem that is in use, such as ext2/3/4, but (1) the partition was quiet at the time, (2) FAT is mostly non-stateful, and (3) the only change was toggling a single flag, not anything to do with file structure.
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