Fsck forced on startup, OS 11.0/11.1

Hi all!

I’m using openSUSE 11.1, and almost every time I start the machine, OS forces filesystem checking for both Reiserfs and Ext3, I have on my system.
My hard drives (320GB and 500GB Seagate’s) are both new(~6 months) and healthy, and I (as you can expect) avoid turning off my PC like… switching off the power supply.

Not only that it is really annoying, but sometimes when I hit ctrl+c to skip the process, it leads to corrupted X server, which refuse to detect my keyboard. Or the worse case- the system is going in recovery mode on tty1, and i have to switch to another VT to login and then run X manually.

I really don’t understand why is openSUSE trying to check my drives, since everything (on the hardware side) seems to be OK.

Sometimes I use shutdown, when i need timed shutdown, but I don’t think it has much to do with the problem.

Thank you in advance!

Usleble wrote:

>
> Hi all!
>
> I’m using openSUSE 11.1, and almost every time I start the machine, OS
> forces filesystem checking for both Reiserfs and Ext3, I have on my
> system.
> My hard drives (320GB and 500GB Seagate’s) are both new(~6 months) and
> healthy, and I (as you can expect) avoid turning off my PC like…
> switching off the power supply.

Are you sure the drives are 100% good and not suffering from the seagate
firmware debacle?

Have a google about this and see if you have the correct fw, however
IIRC it might only affect the 550gb one.

I think the latest one they offer is OK now but don`t take my word for
it as I do not have any segates here.

HTH


Mark

Nil illegitimi carborundum

Can you do a

tune2fs -l /dev/yourext3partition

and look at the mount counts and check intervals? Also do the similar

debugreiserfs /dev/yourreiserpartition

to see that info there.

Also is your battery clock accurate? If it is out by a lot, the system could decide based on timestamps that your filesystem is invalid and do a check.

baskitcaise, thank you for your suggest! But I don’t think it’s a firmware issue, since none of the dozens of distributions i’ve used before, showed me such a thing. (Of course, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the case with openSUSE’s kernel)
I think it’s a openSUSE specific “problem”, I get it on both 11.0 and 11.1 and nowhere else.

ken_yap, thank you too!
This is the tune2fs -l output:

Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          e9e953ac-808f-4558-8c47-58c3ffc21704
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              5242880
Block count:              83883364
Reserved block count:     0
Free blocks:              4383557
Free inodes:              5214311
First block:              1
Block size:               1024
Fragment size:            1024
Reserved GDT blocks:      256
Blocks per group:         8192
Fragments per group:      8192
Inodes per group:         512
Inode blocks per group:   64
Filesystem created:       Fri Jul 18 03:37:23 2008
Last mount time:          Mon Feb  2 20:35:23 2009
Last write time:          Mon Feb  2 20:35:23 2009
**Mount count:              4**
Maximum mount count:      39
Last checked:             Sun Feb  1 12:32:37 2009
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Fri Jul 31 13:32:37 2009
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:               128
Journal inode:            8
Default directory hash:   tea
Directory Hash Seed:      e0be327e-99ee-4691-9675-ec7b8ad2a2ef
Journal backup:           inode blocks

And debugreiserfs:

Filesystem state: consistency is not checked after last mounting

Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x806 of format 3.6 with standard journal
Count of blocks on the device: 2046256
Number of bitmaps: 63
Blocksize: 4096
Free blocks (count of blocks - used [journal, bitmaps, data, reserved] blocks): 199335
Root block: 32904
Filesystem is NOT clean
Tree height: 4
Hash function used to sort names: "r5"
Objectid map size 476, max 972
Journal parameters:
        Device [0x0]
        Magic [0x3e1eb04f]
        Size 8193 blocks (including 1 for journal header) (first block 18)
        Max transaction length 1024 blocks
        Max batch size 900 blocks
        Max commit age 30
Blocks reserved by journal: 0
Fs state field: 0x0:
sb_version: 2
inode generation number: 616776
UUID: df05c616-b27d-41e2-9245-c43c83bf63e4
LABEL:
Set flags in SB:
        ATTRIBUTES CLEAN
Mount count: 15
Maximum mount count: 30
Last fsck run: Fri Jan 23 21:05:27 2009
Check interval in days: 180

I also noticed that the last number of each line describing my partitions in fstab is 2. In other distributions, such as Ubuntu, this number is usually 0 or 1. So, I changed it to 0 and now it doesn’t try to check my drives. But if thats the case, then why is openSUSE’s fstab configured that way by default, and how does that matter? :\

Thank you!

The last field of the fstab line is explained in man fstab. 0 means disable checking (not recommended for real filesystems), 1 means root filesystem (Ubuntu by default installs on one large partition), and 2 means other, non-root, filesystems.

I don’t see anything wrong with your mount counts or dates. And you claim you are shutting down properly and waiting for the shutdown to turn the machine off. So that’s puzzling.

Just to add that I am having the same problem, I have 2 Western Digital drives one with an ext2 (36Gb) partition and one with xfs (500Gb). Each time I start my system up it runs through a file system check which takes around 10mins to complete.

I tend to hibernate the system now to get around this, but would be useful to know why it is happening.

Think there is a temp file left open when shutting down Xorg, mine doesn’t do this when I go to init 3 first then shut down, only when X is running.

Jack

Also, are you doing a clean shutdown and not just turning the pc off? You need to do a proper shutdown - try running ‘shutdown -r now’ as root from a terminal and see if it persists.
Linux doesn’t like it when you pull the plug and likes a clean shutdown.
fsck is usually set to run every month or so on reboot by default though just to check the disks.