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Disk check (dcl) reports Volume not dirty (?)

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Chuckles67

Regular Contributor
I have a USB 2TB hard drive formatted with EXT4 connected to Asus AC66U-B1 with Merlin 384.17.

I formatted the 2TB hard drive as EXT4 on a Mac - the router amtm command fd would not format this drive due to 2TB size.

I used amtm (sw) to install a swap drive of 2GB - the swap memory is seen in the router GUI (Tools > Memory - Swap 0.00 / 2048.00 MB). So far so good.

I installed the disk check tool (dc) using amtm. If I reboot the router I see this in the log:
Code:
Checking boot region...
 Volume not dirty. Refusing to repair in 'automatic-repair' mode.
 Thu Jun  4 07:04:00 DST 2020 Disk check done on /dev/sda1
Should I be concerned with this? What does "volume not dirty" mean?
 
Last edited:
I have a USB 2TB hard drive formatted with EXT4 connected to Asus AC66U-B1 with Merlin 384.17.

I formatted the 2TB hard drive as EXT4 on a Mac - the router amtm command fd would not format this drive due to 2TB size.

I used amtm (sw) to install a swap drive of 2GB - the swap memory is seen in the router GUI (Tools > Memory - Swap 0.00 / 2048.00 MB). So far so good.

I installed the disk check tool (dc) using amtm. If I reboot the router I see this in the log:
Code:
Checking boot region...
 Volume not dirty. Refusing to repair in 'automatic-repair' mode.
 Thu Jun  4 07:04:00 DST 2020 Disk check done on /dev/sda1
Should I be concerned with this? What does "volume not dirty" mean?
That's a good thing!
 
What does "volume not dirty" mean?
It means that the router has no reason to think that there's anything wrong with the disk so it's not going to waste time checking it unnecessarily. If you think there's something wrong with the disk you will have use fsck.ext4's "force check" option.
 
I changed from the 2TB USB hard drive to a 1TB drive formatted with amtm fd. Both disks are Western Digital USB3.0 units. The disk check for the 1TB drive reports:
Code:
 Mon Jun 15 08:05:52 DST 2020 Probing 'ext4' on device /dev/sda1
 Running disk check v2.9, with command 'e2fsck -p' on /dev/sda1
 HDD: clean, 471/61046784 files, 4419221/244181967 blocks
 Mon Jun 15 08:05:57 DST 2020 Disk check done on /dev/sda1
Good stuff.
 
I just noticed that in your original post it said "Checking boot region..." (a fatfsck message) which indicates that it was formatted as FAT32 rather than the ext4 you thought it was. ;)
 
Thanks for looking at this Colin.

Because amtm fd would not format the 2TB drive, I used this extfs utility to format the 2TB: https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/extfs-mac/
Even though the amtm generated swap drive worked (according to Tools) I was suspicious not being able to format using amtm fd.

Now I've switched to the 1TB drive which amtm fd was able to format => all good :)
 

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