Emergency

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, John McGregor wrote:

> If you did it with Knoppix and you are sure that the drive hasn't been 
> affected then a complete shutdown of the machine will kill Knoppix and 
> anything that is residing in its memory buffers.Knoppix does its

The mkfs will still have hit disk (specifically whatever /dev/hda1 was 
referencing).  I think Madison is saying Knoppix hasn't copied anything to 
the new filesystem.

> permanent writes when the shutdown sequence is initiated (if you haven't 
> saved the changes already). "Pulling the plug" on the machine will 
> prevent that and in this case it should leave the original file system 
> intact. YMMV

You can prevent a write to the disk by killing the power before the 
buffercache is flushed, but you need to be fast.  Metadata was flushing 
after no more than 5 seconds last time I checked.

OTOH the nature of a mkfs would make even this impossible.  mkfs does go 
back and look at its handiwork before saying all is ok.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc.
Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd.
Phone: 416-669-3073 Email: rbrockway-wgAaPJgzrDxH4x6Dk/4f9A at public.gmane.org http://www.opentrend.net
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