regular fsck runs are too disturbing

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Hi,
I once reported a bug about this, but Justin Wray suggested that I
discuss this on a mailing list, first.

Ubuntu (7.04) regularly checks my file system with fsck every few (21
it says, but it feels like more often) boot-ups. This check takes more
than 10 minutes on my laptop (which has a 4200rpm HDD). Apart from
SWAP, I only have one partition which is 72GB of which 22GB are used,
so I don't want to imagine how slow it would be with 50GB used, for
example.

These checks are highly disturbing for me, especially in situations
when I just want to quickly look something up, just to find out that I
have to wait 10min before I can do a task that takes 3min. Also, this
problem can be quite disturbing for people who use the laptop for
presentations and only experts can turn it off. I want to suggest that
we find a better solution that is not disturbing, at all.

NOTE: I'm *not* talking about fsck after a crash, but simply after normal use.

Why does fsck need to run, at all, when there is no failure? I guess
you can't detect creaping HDD failures that way, unless they lead to a
crash?

Why have neither I nor my friends seen Windows do this kind of check
(unless there was a crash, of course)?

------
Are there any alternatives? Here are two examples:

Use SMART (AFAIK, Vista does that).

Run fsck read-only (even on mounted partitions) as a low-priority
process in the background when the system is *idle* and report to the
user only when an error is found, then requiring a reboot and full
system check on boot-up.

Regards,
Waldemar Kornewald