How long should fsck take to scan a drive?

Cerin

6/4/23, 3:06 AM

I woke up one morning to find my Ubuntu 20 laptop unresponsive, so I rebooted, and arrived in a BusyBox "(initramfs)" prompt.

Typing "exit" told me that:

The root filesystem on /dev/sda2 requires a manual fsck

So I ran fsck /dev/sda2 -y.

That was a day ago. It's still printing out a ton of messages like:

Inode <number> ref count is 2, should be 1. Fix? yes
Unattached inode <number>
Connect to /lost+found? yes

My drive is 160 GB. How long should this take?

Is it stuck in an infinite loop or does this really take more than a day to scan a drive this size?

This is a solid state drive which I've previously never had any problems with. I know those to sometimes fail. Is this a sign that the drive is probably toast, or should fsck be able to recover it?

0 + 0

partitioning

boot

fsck

hard-drive

Ray

6/4/23, 3:09 AM

I think how long `fsck` takes depends both the size of the disk and the extent of the problem. So, disk size is only one thing to consider. I would think that it's probably toast, but if you're not in a hurry, I'd let it run for how many days it needs since if/when it is done, at least you'll *might* be able to recover something. If you quit now, you'll end up recovering nothing...

guiverc

6/4/23, 3:23 AM

Ubuntu 20? so this is a Ubuntu Core 20 system? (the *year* format releases are different products to the far more common *year.month* products, ie. 20 != 20.04). On any drive issues; I stop trying to use it and always start with validating health; ie. SMART - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools (*do note parts of that doc only apply to 20.04 & won't work on a 20 system*)

Nmath

6/4/23, 4:56 AM

These symptoms resemble a failing hard drive. Failing hard drives can generate a lot of file system errors that prompt a fsck. Additionally, failing hard drives can become painfully slow to read/write if they are constantly encountering issues.