running fsck on root filesystem

[Bill Moran]

akanwar at digitarchy.com wrote:
> I have a remote machine on whose boot disk I want to run fsck. Is there any
> way of booting freebsd form the network and then getting into fixit mode
> without a cdrom or a floppy ?
> 
> I am using pxeboot so far. What is happening is that when I put
> "installFixitHoloShell" in the install.cfg then sysinstall throws me to the
> shell that is VERY barebones. I can't run even a 'ls'. In this case how do
> I figure out what disk slices I have in the system and on which I want to
> run fsck ?

A lot you don't say here.  One thing is _why_ you want to do this.  Another is
what you want to do.  Your description is pretty vague.

fsck is always run on the root filesystem at boot time, in preen mode.  If
you're having some sort of filesystem errors, setting fsck_y_enable="YES" in
/etc/rc.conf will cause the startup scripts to automatically run 'fsck -y' if
fsck fails in preen mode.

If you want to change this behaviour, you _could_ edit /etc/rc to change the
default handling.

 From any shell, you should be able to mount filesystems readonly.  When
mounted readonly, you can safely run fsck.  Use 'mount -r /mountpoint'.  Many
of your commands are not on the root filesystem, so you may need to mount (for
example) /usr before you can execute certain commands.

Does this help?

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com