• Oops: unplugged flash drive without unmounting

    From Winston@21:1/5 to All on Fri Apr 8 12:09:18 2022
    Background:

    I accidentally unplugged a USB flash drive without first unmounting it.
    The file partition had a UFS2 fs.

    Before discovering that mistake, I had mounted and unmounted other
    flash drives on the same mount point.

    When I saw that /mnt still claimed to have a fs mounted, I figured out
    which flash drive it had been, and plugged it back in.

    Not surprisingly, umount didn't seem to care that the drive had been
    plugged back in, and did a forcible unmount.

    Attempting to mount the partition failed (as expected), saying unclean,
    run fsck. fsck just gave a quick error that implied the fs was no
    longer usable. fsck_ffs and fsck_ufs tried harder, but reported a flood
    of problems (mostly INODE CHECK-HASH FAILED, but earlier ones reported
    problems with the cylinder group, superblock, etc.) at terminal speed
    before I ^C'd it. Since the drive was just a backup copy of something
    else, I newfs'ed it, and the drive now works again.

    Questions:

    * Was there anything I could have done to re-associate the drive with
    the mount point?

    * I'm a bit surprised that failing to umount would leave the fs in such
    bad shape. In case the drive had had something important on it, is
    there a better way than fsck* to fix a UFS2 fs that was detached
    without umount'ing, or is the only solution to let fsck do its thing
    and hope that the file(s) are still there when it's finished?

    Thanks!
    -WBE

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