Random problems with filesystem corruption.

[Paul Groves]

The server is on a UPS and has never been powered down forcefully in any 
way so I doubt it is that which has caused the problem. I agree it is 
probably best to replace the disk in any case just to be safe.

I do have a used SSD to hand which used to be in my desktop until I 
upgraded. I only has about 6 months use out of it so it is like new.

The HDD in the server at the minute comes out at 149GB.
and the SSD is 128GB.

The web server HDD only has 16GB used, so the smaller size SSD is more 
than enough.

I do have clonezilla set up on a PXE server on the same network which i 
use mainly for cloning windows PCs, so can I just clone direct from the 
HDD to the smaller SSD then swap in the SSD?


On 15/12/2019 19:03, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 06:44:29PM +0000, Paul Groves wrote:
>> So I have my own personal web server running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, it has two
>> partitions on a 160GB HDD, sda1 is the grub partition and sda2 is the root
>> partition.
>>
>> A few months ago I had a bad superblock error and it wouldn't boot.
>>
>> I booted to the installer USB and run fsck -y /dev/sda2 and this fixed the
>> problem.
>>
>> Now today, I noticed mysql wouldn't start and that the root partition was
>> read only....
>>
>> So I run fsck as before and bam! the server is working again.
>>
>> I have tested the hard disk using SMART with the long and short tests and
>> cannot find any errors.
> 
> SMART isn't necessarily perfect, and it's not unheard of for some
> failures not to show up there.  (One might have thought that the long
> test would scan the whole disk surface and catch that, but I'm not sure
> how guaranteed it is that it will scan the whole disk surface, and even
> then if there's an error that only happens on some percentage of
> reads/writes to a particular sector then it could still be missed.)
> 
> Unless you routinely have power failures or other events that cause the
> system not to shut down cleanly, I'd work on the assumption that it's
> time to replace the drive; it's small enough that doing so hopefully
> won't be prohibitively expensive.
>