Comment 6 for bug 58430

Please don't just fsck automatically for folks.

This just happened to me, and I ended up with a broken system by following the directions and running fsck and having to hold down the "enter" key for a LONG time while ominous messages flew by offering to remove illegal blocks, duplicate blocks, etc.

If I hadn't been wanting to get to bed, or if the data on the system had been more critical, I would have wanted to first make a copy of the disk with a rescue disk, dd and ssh so I could

 1) investigate just what had happened to the system in the first place, to hopefully keep this from happening to me or someone else

 2) be able to try alternate repair strategies.

It may well be that the default option for the majority of inexperienced users should be to offer to do an automatic fsck. But given the likelyhood of severe data loss, I think we really need to also offer them an option to stop, make a copy, consult an expert, or somehow deal with the situation manually as best they can.

And in either case, I think we should do whatever we can to maintain a log of the results of the fsck. That will probably be hard in many circumstances, but we could at least tell folks to stop, think about how they got there, and take notes for future reference. Some will be able to run the fsck via a serial port or something. It would also be nice if fsck offered some statistics at the end - max and min block number affected, # repairs, # repairs refused, or whatever to characterize what happened for future forensics or bug investigations.

Just remember, some folks will REALLY CARE about the data.