I'm developing for a headless embedded appliance, running CentOS 6.2. The user can connect a keyboard, but not a monitor, and a serial console would require opening the case, something we don't want the user to have to do. This all pretty much obviates the possibility of using a recovery USB drive to boot from, unless all it does is blindly reimage the harddrive. I would like to provide some recovery facilities, and I have written a tool that comes up on /dev/tty1 in place of getty to provide these functions.

One such function is fsck. I have found out how to remount the root and other file systems read-only. Now that they are read-only, it should be safe to fsck them and then reboot. Unfortunately, fsck complains to me that the filesystems are mounted and refuses to do anything.

How can I force fsck to run on a read-only mounted partition?

Based on my research, this is going to have to be something obscure. "-f" just means to force repair of a clean (but unmounted) partition. I need to repair a clean or unclean mounted partition. From what I read, this is something "only experts" should do, but no one has bothered to explain how the experts do it. I'm hoping someone can reveal this to me.

BTW, I've noticed that e2fsck 1.42.4 on Gentoo will let you fsck a mounted partition, even mounted read-write, but it seems only to do so if fsck is run from a terminal, so it can ask the user if they're sure they want to do something so dangerous. I'm not sure if the CentOS version does the same thing, but it appears that fsck CAN repair a mounted partition, but it flatly refuses to when not run from a terminal.

One last-resort option is for me to compile my own hacked fsck. But I'm afraid I'll mess it up in some unexpected way.

Thanks!

Note: Originally posted here.