Everything was going so well

[JMac]

@sdetweil when i run e2fsck…
I get
e2fsck: permission denied while trying to open /dev/sda
you must have r/w access to the filesystem or be root.

[sdetweil]

@JMac yes, you must use sudo on both commands unmount and fsck

sorry I was unclear

normal users should not be able to mess with hardware, so one must act as root

[JMac]

@sdetweil I run sudo umount…
and get
umount:… not mounted,

then run
sudo e2fsck -f -v /dev/sda
and get
e2fsck 1.46.2 (28-feb-2021)
/dev/sda is in use
efsck: connot continue, aborting.

[sdetweil]

@JMac hm… wonder what is using it?

can you open the disks app on the pi from the dedktop menu

[JMac]

@sdetweil on the home screen I have 2 drive icons under the wastebasket.
one is boot
the other is rootfs

i then have the option to eject these in the file manager

[sdetweil]

@JMac there should be that drive on /dev/sda too

[JMac]

@sdetweil I’m a little confused (I’d imagine thats pretty clear at this point).

i run sudo fdisk -1
and get
Disk /dev/ram0 through to Disk /dev/ram15
the list then has
Disk/dev/mmcblk0: 7.4GiB (my thinking is this is the current/new sd card)

Device
/dev/mmcblk0p1
/dev/mmcblk0p2

Disk /dev/sda:59.69 GiB (I again assume this is the old SD with my original MM setup)

Device
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda/2

end of the list.

does any of that make sense/ is any of it what I’m looking for? I’ve obviously taken out several lines under each of those headers just for space and time typing.

[sdetweil]

@JMac yes sda has two partitions boot and rootfs

but you need to run e2fsck on /dev/sda2
e2fsck mean extended version 2, file system check

[JMac]

so should i also run sudo umount /dev/sda2 before running sudo e2fsck -f -v /dev/sda2?

[sdetweil]

@JMac yes