: Can someone explain the FSCK command to someone who is somewhat familiar with the Unix system but has far to go before mastering it. Thanks
: Dan
:

fsck is a command to check the consistency of a filesystem.
It compares the superblock and the inode tables for blocks and sizes.
The superblock contains the label, size and total number of inodes.
If it got corrupted you can use the alternate superblock using -o b=# option.
Then it checks for pathnames, connectivity (link files) and reference count
(no of link files).

After repairing the file system, lost files are stored on lost+found directory
using the inode number as the filename.