It's well-known that you should never fsck a mounted partition. I can understand how this could easily lead to corruption if the filesystem is written to by fsck (e.g., the -a option is used), but why can't read-only checks be run on mounted disks?
Why You Can’t FSCK a Mounted Partition – Explanation
filesystemsunix
Best Answer
From:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck.ext3
"Note that in general it is not safe to run
e2fsck
on mounted filesystems. The only exception is if the-n
option is specified, and-c
,-l
, or-L
options are not specified. However, even if it is safe to do so, the results printed bye2fsck
are not valid if the filesystem is mounted. Ife2fsck
asks whether or not you should check a filesystem which is mounted, the only correct answer is ''no''. Only experts who really know what they are doing should consider answering this question in any other way. "