Slow fsck times

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 09:15:46PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> I have WD hard disk that started throwing a sector error. I unmounted it
> and started fsck on it. Now, about three hours later, it's only showing
> 2.4% complete -- which seems rather slow. According to htop, the memory
> usage is 1.6% and the CPU usage negligible; iostat does show changes in
> reads/writes for the disk. So far no calls for intervention or to fix
> anything; it's just grinding away.
> 
> Question: Is this normal? Should I just let it run? At this rate, on a
> 1TB disk, it's going to take until Tuesday or so.

Is dmesg showing lots of I/O timeouts?

I would expect fsck on a 1TB disk to take around an hour or two.

Sector errors will really slow things down.  In fact I would never run
fsck on a disk giving bad sector errors.  I would mirror it with dd
conv=noerror to another disk or a disk image, then fsck that.  Running
fsck is likely to destroy whatever is left of the filesystem if you run
it on a failing disk.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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