Question

A user reports that files on a secondary data disk mounted at /data are intermittently unreadable, and dmesg shows repeated 'EXT4-fs error' messages referencing bad block references and directory corruption. The disk passes a SMART self-test with no reallocated sectors. You need to repair the filesystem structure safely. Which approach should you take?

Accepted Answer

Unmount /data, then run 'fsck.ext4 -f /dev/sdb1' to force a full consistency check and repair

Answer

Run 'fsck.ext4 -f /dev/sdb1' while /data remains mounted so users can keep working during the repair

Answer

Run 'mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1' to rebuild the filesystem and clear the corruption

Answer

Remount /data read-only with 'mount -o remount,ro /data' and run 'tune2fs -c 1 /dev/sdb1'