On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 09:13:07PM -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> I've got a corrupted btrfs partition.
> Does the archlinux install disk have btrfsck on it?
> If yes, I'll probably need to run btrfs --repair /dev/sda2 on the system.
> If repair goes badly, I'll have to reinstall the system.

Hi, Jude.

The arch iso does indeed have btrfs-progs, but running a --repair is not
always the correct course of action for a broken btrfs mount. For
certain issues, it can make things worse. I would suggest asking for
advice on the btrfs kernel mailing list:

linux-bt...@vger.kernel.org

You should give the exact error messages / dmesg output you get when
attempting to mount the btrfs partition.

> I would like to know how to prevent btrfs corruption in the first place.

Generally speaking, btrfs is fairly robust against corruption. There are
a few things that it is more sensitive to than other filesystems,
however. Faulty RAM can cause metadata corruptions that render a btrfs
filesystem unmountable. It's often advised to do a memtest on your
system if you get unexpected filesystem errors. Cheap storage media that
lies about FLUSH command completions is very likely to corrupt btrfs in
the event of a system crash or unexpected poweroff. And the parity raid
modes (raid 5 / 6) are still considered experimental and cannot be
relied upon for repairing corrupted data.

--Sean

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