TABLE OF CONTENTS Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
Final words of Groucho Marx
This chapter is a discussion of case studies of some complex file system problems and how they were resolved. We think the best way to discuss how to troubleshoot file system problems is by looking at examples and completely understanding what steps were followed and why. These case studies were derived from many years of experience in dealing with real customer problems. They are representative of the kinds of issues that some customers may experience.
This is a real-world example of how a procedure was developed to remove a corrupted directory from an AdvFS domain. This procedure is only provided as an example, but we believe that it should be general enough to be used in other cases by people stuck with a small number of corrupted files or directories. In this case, a full restore of a large file system is not practical to clean up a minor problem such as this one.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the clri(8) command would be the best way to approach a problem such as this one if the corruption were on a UFS file system; however, for AdvFS there is no equivalent to clri(8), therefore, another approach was needed for dealing with a corrupted directory. In the absence of a specialized tool, a procedure using standard tools was needed.
We begin with an individual who finds that he...
