Checking the file system on a VPS
Find out how to check a file system for errors in rescue mode
Last updated 20th April 2021
Objective
This guide explains how to diagnose file systems on OVHcloud Virtual Private Servers using rescue mode.
OVHcloud is providing you with services for which you are responsible, with regard to their configuration and management. You are therefore responsible for ensuring they function correctly.
If you encounter any difficulties performing these actions, please contact a specialist service provider and/or discuss the issue with our community on https://community.ovh.com/en/. OVHcloud cannot provide you with technical support in this regard.
Requirements
- A VPS in your OVHcloud account
- Access to the OVHcloud Control Panel
Instructions
GNU/Linux VPS
Log in to the OVHcloud Control Panel and initiate a server reboot in rescue mode. Follow our rescue mode guide if necessary.
On older VPS ranges, your partitions will be automatically mounted in rescue mode. You can verify this by using the following command:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 2.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 2.5G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 80G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 80G 0 part /mnt/sdb1
The example output above displays an existing mount point. This means that the partition to check must be unmounted first:
$ umount /dev/sdb1
If your VPS is of a current range, the MOUNTPOINT column should be empty and you can skip the previous step.
Now you can check the partition with "fsck":
$ fsck /dev/sdb1
cloudimg-rootfs: clean, 134995/3225600 files, 849881/6525179 blocks
If the result is empty, it usually means that the file system is clean. You can also force a check:
$ fsck /dev/sdb1 -f
Windows VPS
The instructions above do generally not apply to a Windows VPS, because the file system check does not support NTFS. You can however perform a NTFS consistency check on the partitions.
Log in to the OVHcloud Control Panel and initiate a server reboot in rescue mode. Follow our rescue mode guide if necessary.
On older VPS ranges, your partitions will be automatically mounted in rescue mode. You can verify this by using the following command:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 2.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 2.5G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 100G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 350M 0 part /mnt/sdb1
├─sdb2 8:18 0 99.7G 0 part /mnt/sdb2
The example output above displays existing mount points. This means that the partition to check must be unmounted first:
$ umount /dev/sdb1
If your VPS is of a current range, the MOUNTPOINT column should be empty and you can skip the previous step.
The following command checks the partition for consistency and tries to resolve errors if any are found:
$ ntfsfix /dev/sdb1
Go further
Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.
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