Easiest way to corrupt ext3 file system (for testing)?

Question

I need to corrupt ext3 file system (for testing purposes) to some repairable state. How that can be done?

How repairable do you want it? All data recoverable, or just back to a functional filesystem?

alvosu · Answer 1 · 2011-02-01 13:22:15Z

up vote 2 down vote accepted

'mkswap /dev/ext3_dev' or 'dd if=/dev/zerro of=/dev/ext3_dev bs=1024 skip=1000 count=300'

answered Feb 1 '11 at 13:00

alvosu
4,53739

	if=/dev/null won't do as much as /dev/zero – poige Feb 1 '11 at 13:06
	of course /dev/zerro – alvosu Feb 1 '11 at 13:24

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Ency · Answer 2 · 2011-02-01 12:41:48Z

up vote 0 down vote

Well, create ext3 on lvm and shrink lvm, mkfs.ext3 without umounting, some lowlevel tool to delete inodes...

answered Feb 1 '11 at 12:41

Ency
397210

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poige · Answer 3 · 2011-02-01 13:09:32Z

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I'd write simple C-program for that doing a number of random seeks & destroy.

answered Feb 1 '11 at 13:09

poige
2,177311

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slashdot · Answer 4 · 2011-02-01 14:31:42Z

up vote 0 down vote

How about just 'fsck' the filesystem while it is mounted, and you are writing some thing to it. This should work pretty consistently.

answered Feb 1 '11 at 14:31

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4 Answers