Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

A FileSystem is basically a file format for a disk. In order to use the diskspace, you need a way to determine which parts are in use, and where files are located, how they're called and so on. This is what a FileSystem provides. FileSystems lists the many different kinds of FileSystems currently in use.

If part of a FileSystem has been corrupted you need to be able to repair it. Under MicrosoftWindows the stock tool is called !ScanDisk?. Unix systems call their corresponding tool fsck(8). fsck is automatically run if the FileSystem wasn't properly unmounted or hasn't been checked in a long time (the SuperUser can specify what constitutes a long time).

On a MicrosoftWindows system, partitions are formatted with the old and aging FAT of the much more modern NTFS FileSystem. In contrast, the traditional FileSystem of choice on Linux is Ext2. It is very trusty and rock solid - losing much data from an Ext2 partition is nearly impossible short of a hardware failure. The only problem is that an fsck takes a very long time. On servers that don't get rebooted in months, this is not much of a headache, but Linux is making its way to the desktop, where machines get rebooted frequently. Therefor, a variant that supports journalling was created: Ext3.

JournaledFileSystems? keep a log of changes pending completion, so in the event of a crash, they can quickly finish up or undo changes as required to bring the FileSystem back to a consistent state. A full consistency check with fsck crawling the entire disk is then unnecessary. Nevertheless, you should fsck partitions at least every once in a blue moon to ensure that no inconsistencies creep in. The likelihood is low, but better to be safe than sorry.

You may also want to look at how the FileSystemHierarchy is usually organized on a Linux machine.


CategoryBeginners