You all are the best!

[eobard]

And here's your chance to prove it. I recently installed Ubuntu (6.10) and while almost everything has gone flawless there is one problem that keeps staring me in the face. Every time I boot up I get a fsck error: "differences between boot sector and backup". It only happens in Ubuntu. Slackware doesn't see the problem, XP doesn't have issues either. Moreover the system runs fine, the apparent error does not effect operation, leading me to conclude the primary boot sector (not the backup) has the correct data. I tried to repair it using dosfsck using option #2 (copy primary to backup) but it won't commit the changes. I keep getting a "changes not written" response. I've tried doing it as su but it won't take. At first I went to the official Ubuntu forums for help (they should be the ones to know Ubuntu, right?) The advice I got there was to just ignore it if it wasn't doing any harm. Over at Linuxquestions.org the advice was backup the whole disk, recreate the partition table and the copy the whole disk back. To me that's overkill. There's got to be a less "baby with the bath water" solution. So now I'm back in my home stomping grounds, and even though Ubuntu forums is the formal official home for Ubuntu info, and Linuxquestions.org has a huge membership base who's primary focus is Linux, I know someone here will have the answer I need. So people, gimmie the good news. What can I do to fix this?

 

[Evilsizer]

well if it were me i would wipe the hd clean and start over. that sounds about like the only solution to me.

 

[eobard]

Found out a way around it. I used a boot CD with Gparted to slightly reduce the size of the primary partition of the drive in question. I then saved, rebooted and resized the drive to use up the bit of space I had just freed up. In doing so GParted re-wrote the partition table for both the primary and backup.

 

[Evilsizer]

interesting....

 

[mydosaysplease]

well if it were me i would wipe the hd clean and start over. that sounds about like the only solution to me.

that would work for m$ but still an evil suggestion. had he done it

 

[ponkan pinoy]

Does fsck allow writing to a mounted filesystem?

 

[blueswitch]

yes gparted is a fantastic utility